A Boy And His Dog

♦ SOCIAL SENSITIVITY ♦

In Ellison's writing, and especially in this story, characters who harm or exploit others are carefully written so that it is clear that these characters are not good people, nor are they happy or admirable or worthy of emulation. The reader may come to understand what it feels like to be that person, but is not expected to want to be that person.

A Boy and His Dog

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Characters in A Boy and His Dog can and do fight to defend themselves or their associates, and this is portrayed as necessary but to be avoided when possible. The risk of death or injury is very high, when all parties are desperate for survival; and there is little or no medical treatment for injuries.

It is very apparent that the author intends for the reader to see the difference between the violence that Vic commits to defend himself and Blood (and Quilla June, whom he regards as an exploitable short-term resource rather than a companion) and the unnecessarily malicious rape, theft, and murder that goes on among the surface-dwelling people, Vic included.

The author also makes a clear depiction of the subterranean town, where a thin veneer of genteel behavior conceals a hypocritically savage exploitation. Vic is not the only character that the reader may condemn for his crimes (even though he knows no other way for humans to interact). The people in the underground town know what cooperative behavior is necessary for a human community, but they send an ignorant teenage girl out into a wilderness of desperate thieves and murderers. They can afford to lose one of their girls after all, and choose not to risk one of their few experienced grown men (who might have been able to move through the upper town more safely) to engage Vic as an ally instead of a dupe. Once they have a healthy young man in their bunker, rather than honestly hiring Vic as a stud or welcoming him into their families, they continue to conspire to make him a captive and rape him repeatedly. He is just another exploitable short-term resource, and this community is just another group of desperate people living at the expense of others.

Violence leads to impasse, or a meaningless repetitive struggle stripped of purpose and meaning. The committee of Quilla June's community missed an excellent opportu-

nity for renewal when they locked Blood out and enslaved Vic. A safe environment of cooperative people educated by Blood and seeded by the healthy children of a man adopted to become an advisor of the committee could have sustained itself in diversity and vigor for another twenty years before emerging to the surface, ready and capable of dealing with the tough sparse remnants of a depopulated world.

A Boy and His Dog outlines precisely the possible future feared by many people during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Stories in settings like this one were elemental in focusing public attention on the necessary effort to prevent nuclear war and environmental disasters. In the 1960s, no one published stories with champagne being drunk at Checkpoint Charlie as the Berlin Wall was torn down, a real-life situation for which Ellison did not envision in his fiction.

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