Out, out –
By Robert Frost
An essay
Out, out –
by Robert Frost
In Out, Out – we hear a narrator who is outside the story he is telling, but who wishes to
enter into the scene as one of the characters as if he might be of some help. As narrator, however,
he has only one role to play – the role of witness. Essentially, what he witnesses is the absence of
divine meaning or purpose in nature and in human affairs. The phrase “lifted eyes," with subtle
irony, serves as a parody of Psalm 121, which opens: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from
whence cometh my help." No help will come from the hills or anywhere else in Frost's poem. In the
larger existential sense, not only the boy's loss of his hand and his death, but also the indifference
of nature cause the watchers to take fright, and it is this reality which, at heart, "No one believed."
The title of the poem is an allusion to Macbeth's soliloquy that ends with the phrase in which
Macbeth sums up the tale of his life as "signifying nothing." This poem, like many of Frost's poems,
is a confrontation with such nothingness – a nothingness in which the onlookers here will be
compelled to believe. Toward the end of the poem, the words “little – less – nothing!" complete the
echo on the theme of nothingness from Shakespeare's play.
The confrontation with the meaninglessness of death is anticipated early in the poem with
the image of dust: "The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard / And made dust." The poem's
narrative arc is of dust returning to "dusty death" (Shakespeare's phrase), although the narrator
and reader are at first misled by the sweet-scented odour of the cut wood in the breeze. The
narrator, along with those other would-be believers who have lifted eyes, appears to be enjoying a
vision of great depth into nature itself – “Five mountain ranges one behind the other / Under the
sunset, far into Vermont" – as if nature were beautiful and benign, a spectacle of Wordsworthian
and biblical revelation. But the narrator subsequently will realize that he has had, rather, a vision of
nature's beautiful indifference, which he can describe but cannot affect. He says, "day was all but
done. / Call it a day, I wish they might have said." In his admission, "I wish" we hear the narrator
seeking to intrude into the story, to become simultaneously both actor and narrator. Until now, we
have seen him as the seemingly omniscient narrator, the removed narrator, but now he cannot
control the world of the story; all he can do is tell the story and contain his own grief to the best of
his ability as a witness. His "as if" statements – “the saw, / As if to prove saws knew what supper
meant," and "the hand, / Half in appeal, but half as if to keep / The life from spilling" – both fall into
the category of wishing rather than fictive believing for they are clearly contrary to fact.
We hear the narrator's human voice intrude again in two other places. When he says
"However it was," describing the meeting of the saw and the boy's hand, he expresses his
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Out, out –
By Robert Frost
An essay
reluctance to complete his story of the boy's needless death in that beautiful Vermont sunset. The
narrator, however, is not the one who can cry out because he is not in the story. The boy gives
voice directly to his terror, but the narrator can cry out only as a storyteller, by implication, in partial
identification with the boy whose tale he is relating: "The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh, / As
he swung toward them holding up the hand." The boy's horrible laughing cry seems to bring him to
a final vision that replaces the earlier vision of the five mountain ranges: "Then the boy saw all."
But the boy does not see all. The most his terror can believe is that he is going to lose his hand; he
is not able to take that terrible imagining to its finality of nothingness – “Don't let him cut my hand
off – / The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!" The boys vision of nothing is not
complete: the loss of his hand will become the loss of his life.
And so for the narrator, there will be, ironically, an increase of less, until less becomes
nothing, and there is nothing he can do. For a moment, his narration is reduced to the impotent
word "So," and in that minimal word all his restrained grief is held. In effect, Frost's poem contains
exactly what the narrator cannot express. That strangled "So" is the narrator's cry of bearing
witness to a story that finally must be believed for what it is-unredeemable loss-in a scene he
cannot enter. He cannot rescue the boy: "the hand was gone already." Yet there is still more
nothing to be perceived: "the watcher at his pulse took fright." In the poem's sense of human
helplessness in an indifferent Darwinian universe where survival in part depends merely on chance
circumstances, we are all potential watchers, and what we see is death without redemption,
signifying nothing. So. So? So! How shall we read that enigmatic work& But the story is not over
yet; the boy will die, and someone must tell of it: "And they, since they / Were not the one dead,
turned to their affairs." There is a strange coldness in the characters of Frost's poem as they
continue their lives in the spirit of necessity; there is still the work of brute survival for them to do. In
the spirit of "Let the dead bury the dead," their instinctual commitment is to life and continuity. In a
revealing letter, Frost wrote: "And “ suppose “ am a brute in that my nature refuses to carry
sympathy to the point of going crazy just because someone else goes crazy, or of dying just
because someone else dies." All the narrator, holding to his sanity, can do as he attempts to
contain his personal grief, is express his sorrow through the telling of the tale that confirms a belief
he dreads but must acknowledge, and that tale, which his commitment to the truth demands that
he relate, becomes an extension of his own empathizing identity, his capacity to believe in the
suffering of others. Beyond the uncertain "So" of his own voice, he has become imaginatively one
with the characters to whose lives he has borne witness, but whose sorrows he cannot ameliorate.
In this poem, the wish for some kind of "as if" consolation meets head-on Frost's "Not to believe"
scepticism, which, nevertheless, does not exclude the story-telling narrator's imaginative
compassion. In his confrontation with "nothing." the narrator has only the design of his story to
cling to.
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