Hello, I Must Be Going

Hello I Must Be Going is a novel spanning ten years in the life of the Hawthorne family: Randall, a Vietnam veteran, his wife Gerrie, and their children, Frankie and Teddy. The novel is narrated by Frankie and has three sections. The first section opens in the summer of 1980, when Randall commits suicide; we watch as the rest of the family copes with the immediate effects of grief. In section two we revisit the family seven years later and see how they have redefined themselves---or attempted to do so---after Randall's death. The third section returns to 1979, when Randall was alive and relatively well, and we see the family in a hopeful context.;In the companion critical essay I begin with E.M. Forster's acclaimed Aspects of the Novel, in which Forster examines the techniques used in crafting novels, and then move on to discuss Madison Smartt Bell's Narrative Design, which examines two different types of novels---the linear and the modular. I then discuss the structure of Hello, which attempts, through a "modular" construction, to focus not on the "crisis" of the story - Randall's suicide - as a traditional, linear novel would, but rather on the long-term effects of catastrophic events, and the themes of memory and grief.