49 pages • 1 hour read
Russell BanksRule of the Bone
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig”
As Bone and Rose wait for the bus to arrive, a couple arrives to see the man’s mother off. They strike up a conversation when they hear Bone tell Rose to sit by the woman, and after the bus leaves, they pick him up hitchhiking. When they mention that they’re from Keene, Bone asks if they know the Ridgeways (the family whose house he squatted in during Chapter 7); they knowingly say yes. He continues, asking if they know Russ. When the man asks Bone his name, he realizes that he’s might be telling too much. This is confirmed when he exits the vehicle and sees the Connecticut plates; the couple is almost certainly the Ridgeways themselves, and Bone reflects that everything he had on him belonged to them.
Bone continues to his house and finds that it’s a mess when he arrives. As he looks for his cat, Bone’s stepfather Ken comes out of the bedroom in his underwear and tells him the cat died. Ken says that he’s lost his job, Bone’s mother has moved in with his grandmother, and that she’s attending Al Anon and refusing to return until Ken cleans up his act.
When Ken sees Bone’s tattoo, he threatens him, first with violence and then with rape. Bone takes out his gun and points it at Ken; he makes a deal with himself that if Ken takes one more step or says one more bad thing, he’ll shoot. Instead, Ken falls onto the couch and starts crying, and Bone leaves, regretting the fact that he couldn’t kill his stepfather.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Red Rover”
Bone next goes to the clinic where his mother works. He is worried that he’s on the edge, and that if one thing goes the wrong way he might end up going on a killing spree. He asks the receptionist Cherie to get his mother; Cherie is shocked to see him alive, but agrees.
Bone’s mother arrives and is ecstatic to see him. She hugs him and explains what’s happened since he’s been gone. Bone tries to tell her about Ken’s sexual predation, but cannot be blunt about it, and his mother says that Ken’s drinking is the problem. They get into a fight, and because Bone doesn’t know how to tell his mother what really drives his hatred of Ken, his mother turns the problems the family faces into Bone’s doing. Bone says that he won’t come home if Ken is there, and when she continues to not listen, he becomes more desperate in his ultimatum. Bone knows he’s screwing up his relationship with his mother forever, but he can see no other way; she tells him he should go, and he does.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Over the River and Through the Woods”
Bone trudges through the rain to make one last stop in Au Sable: his grandmother’s apartment. His grandmother is thrilled to see him alive, too, but they quickly return to their old dynamic. In Bone’s view, his grandmother loves attention, and loves making everything about her, and Bone takes liberties with making fun of her about this and other things right under her nose.
Bone takes an antagonistic posture toward his grandmother, flopping on the couch while still wet and ignoring her to flip through TV channels. Bone realizes he’s still incredibly angry because he needs help but no one is capable of helping him. Everyone sees him as a problem to be solved or as a reflection of their failures. After watching MTV and ignoring his grandmother’s attempts to engage him in conversation, Bone gets up off the couch and pokes through the fridge. When she asks him if he wants some egg salad, he says what he really wants is $50. This scares her, and he backs off. She then mentions that he’s being cruel to her in the same way Bone’s biological father used to.
This piques Bone’s interest, and he starts asking questions about his father, Paul Dorset, that he’s never asked before. He learns that his father lied about his military service to become an x-ray technician, using a romance with his mother to land a job at the clinic. He and Bone’s mother divorced after he had an affair, and the last Bone’s grandmother had heard, his father had moved to the Caribbean, perhaps Jamaica. Bone thinks that if he’d known his real father at all, he would’ve solved his problems, particularly Ken’s sexual abuse. He leaves his grandmother’s house and decides to walk back to I-Man’s bus, as he has a lot to think about.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Bone’s decision to go home to his family leads to three confrontations, first with his abuser, then with the person who allowed that abuse, and finally with a woman who turns a blind eye in favor of her own self-interest. In each of these confrontations, Bone cannot act in a way that aligns with his plan; he is growing in that he has realized that he needs to actively work to make peace with his troubled life, but he is still too immature to respond with anything but rage, and that rage leads to his family falling into old patterns and his mother responding to him as the problem instead of listening to his pain. He is a character who is desperate for agency—he thinks about how much he desperately wants to kill his stepfather—but he cannot overcome his trauma, in part because the people around him are viewing him through their mutual history instead of considering him as an adult.
Bone’s rage, and his belief that he is capable of horrific violence, is in line with the growing fears about gun violence in 1990s America and the concern that young men of Generation X/early-Millennials were not learning healthy ways of expressing anger (it’s telling that one of Bone’s responses to being upset is to plop down and watch some MTV). Though this book predates the Columbine massacre, the grunge, punk, and metal culture that Bone steeps himself in throughout the first half of the novel was known for its culture of social outcasts taking solace in rejecting normal society, sometimes with violent results.
His desire to know his father foreshadows the decision that Bone is about to make in the coming chapters (travelling to Jamaica with I-Man) and influences his sense of I-Man as a surrogate father; though he doesn’t have the realization at the time, he is actively making choices that will allow him to meet up with Paul Dorset. There are a number of chance encounters—Bone meeting the Ridgeways, for example—and these are presented through Bone’s childlike, “binocular” view of the world. Because of I-Man, Bone learns to understand how these chance encounters are driven by his own decisions, and that fate, karma, and chance are often the products of a person’s agency; Bone needs to take control of his own life.
Related Titles
By Russell Banks
