Mystic River

Sean grew up in the Point, the slightly wealthier working-class neighborhood of the Boston suburb. Even from a young age, he can detect this difference between him and his friends, Jimmy and Dave: “he could feel the weight of the street, its homes, the entire Point and its expectations for him. He was not a kid who stole cars. He was a kid who’d go to college someday” (10). He was the type of child who knew opportunities awaited him, and that knowledge causes him to move through life with ease and certainty. As he grows into adulthood, this quality comes across as entitlement: “Jimmy could still see that thing in [Sean’s] face he’d always hated, the look of a guy the world always worked for” (119).

Sean’s childhood desire to do good and make something of himself is fulfilled in his decision to become a detective, but the job turns him into a misanthrope. After seeing the worst of humanity on a daily basis, Sean becomes “hard, intractable, reductive in his thinking” (187). His hope to protect the world becomes a cold “contempt for people [and] an inability to believe in higher motives and altruism” (186).

The imprints of childhood friendship and trauma manifest differently in Sean than they do for Jimmy or Dave; the effect of witnessing his friend’s abduction and being ineffectual in preventing it marks Sean with a need to protect and enforce the law.