51 pages • 1 hour read

All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1999

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-11

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Rosebud and Cross

During Stevie’s trial, a friend named Mary Scott gives him a rose. She tells him that it is a symbol of faith in the divine intervention of St. Theresa. Similarly, Michael gives Stevie a small silver cross as a reminder of their family faith. After his guilty verdict, Stevie leaves the crumpled rosebud and cross on a windowsill, and as MacDonald sadly observes, “It was one thing to feel forsaken by the criminal justice system. It was another to feel forsaken by God” (246). While Stevie is no longer able to cling to these two symbols of faith for support, Michael cannot make himself jettison the symbols of his own faith; he takes the rose and cross and puts them in his pocket, signaling that he retains hope despite The Widespread Impact of Abandonment.

Dreams

The occurrence of significant dreams is often used as an element of foreshadowing as MacDonald relates the many tragedies of his family history. Often, one or another of the MacDonalds will experience a dream that portends the imminent death of a family member or a close friend, and this pattern imbues the text with a sense of foreboding, mirroring the family’s constant mindset that the next catastrophe is always lurking just around the corner. Although MacDonald never clarifies whether his younger self believes the dreams to be real prophecies, they often seem to come true, and their repeated occurrence in the text creates a sense that violence and death are all but inevitable in Southie. Notably, Kevin’s death is foreshadowed in a dream, as are the deaths of both Timmy Baldwin and Frankie.

Whitey Bulger

The real-life gangster Whitey Bulger remains a constant yet largely invisible presence within the narrative, and he also serves as a symbol of the rampant corruption in South Boston. He runs the crime organization responsible for the drugs, booze, and hijacking trade in Southie, and his dangerous influence can be felt and seen everywhere, even after Michael returns to the area as an adult. Bulger is responsible for enforcing The Code of Silence in South Boston, under which there is nothing worse than being a snitch. He instills a self-serving form of loyalty among Southie residents that protects him from police scrutiny and backlash from the citizens. Late in the book, Michael finally learns that Bulger has been working with the FBI since his rise to power in the mid-1970s. He is enraged to realize that not only was Bulger destroying the neighborhood (and the lives of many people, including Michael’s brothers), but he was also helping the government, which in exchange overlooked Bulger’s ongoing crimes. Bulger therefore becomes a symbol of the consequences of crime, the cost of silence, and the hypocrisy of the American government, all of which lead MacDonald to pursue a life of activism.