More Than This

There is a horse painting in the living room of Seth’s childhood home, which enables him to recognize where he is when he wakes up in the now deserted world. The painting is a reproduction of a detail from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Guernica is an anti-war painting created after Nazi Germany bombed Guernica, Spain at the behest of the country’s dictator to squash freedom fighters. The large painting includes a series of twisted and contorted figures, suffering and dying in the horrors of war and fascist rule in Spain. Notable figures in the painting include a horse and a person clutching a dead child. Since he was a child, Seth has been terrified of and fascinated with the painting. He describes the horse as having “a crazed eye, a tongue like a spike, trapped inside a burning world” (17) and repeatedly emphasizes the feeling that it is “looking right at him” (17) and “watching him” (136). Because of its looming presence in the young boy’s life, the horse painting symbolizes Seth’s personal and familial trauma, as well as the cultural trauma that comes with society collapsing, much like in Guernica, Spain when the bombs were dropped. Seth comments that “It is something out of a nightmare, something horrible and hysterical, something unable to listen to reason or understand mercy” (31), which alludes to the irrational and unpredictable effects of trauma.