Ralph the Duck by Frederick Busch
"Ralph the Duck" by Frederick Busch is a poignant narrative centered on an unnamed narrator who grapples with personal and relational turmoil. At 42 years old, he finds himself as the oldest undergraduate at an elite college, reflecting on a troubled marriage marked by the tragic loss of a daughter. His military background and status as a veteran add layers to his identity, creating a disconnection from his younger classmates, whose privilege he observes with disdain. Throughout the story, the narrator engages with a red-haired coed and his younger English professor, navigating a series of emotionally charged encounters that reveal vulnerabilities and complexities in both himself and those around him.
The narrator's interactions highlight themes of care, misunderstanding, and the struggle for connection, especially during a critical moment when he attempts to save the distressed young woman after she takes an overdose. His storytelling intertwines with his experiences, ultimately underscoring the weight of past trauma and the hope for redemption and understanding in a world filled with challenges. The narrative weaves together elements of domestic realism, exploring the intricacies of human emotions against a backdrop of academic life and personal history.
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Ralph the Duck by Frederick Busch
First published: 1989
Type of plot: Domestic realism
Time of work: The mid-1980's
Locale: A northeastern U.S. college campus
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a forty-two-year-old security guard and part-time studentFanny , his wifeHis English professor A red-haired female student
The Story
The unnamed narrator, awakened at 5:25 a.m. by his vomiting dog, reveals that he has misbehaved the previous night, making his wife cry. He intimates that his behavior was part of a pattern and that his marriage has problems. They once had a daughter, but she evidently died in early childhood; he is less than forthcoming about details in this, as in most areas of his private life. He calls himself the oldest college student in the United States, although he knows it is not technically true. At forty-two years old, however, he is nearly twice the age of the average undergraduate on his campus, old enough, significantly, to be most students' father. He is a military veteran, although just too old to have served in Vietnam. As an employee of the college, he is allowed to enroll for one class per semester and figures that he can finish his undergraduate degree in another sixteen years. Distanced from his classmates by both age and class—it is an elite private school—he has disdain for their smugness, their self-indulgence, and their privilege. He is also suspicious of his English professor, who is younger than he, handsome, and rather too slick. The professor seems to hope that the narrator is a Vietnam veteran, particularly a Special Forces operative.
The story moves by a series of encounters with a red-haired coed and the professor, while scenes with Fanny serve as punctuation or commentary. In the first, he finds the young woman standing outside her dormitory in her bathrobe and rubber-bottomed boots, crying that her father does not love her. When she says no one loves her, he gives her a hug and gets her to safety. His thanks is a mild reprimand from the head of nonacademic services for the physical contact. Shifting to his role as student, he finds himself corrected by the professor for using a four-letter word in a theme on Faulkner. The professor corrects him while using the same word himself, trying to prove that he is no prude in these matters. The narrator sees the professor as slumming, with his working-class-chic style of dress—denoted by his ironed dungarees—and his studied, regular-guy mannerisms.
After attending, and sleeping through, Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954) with Fanny, he has two telling encounters with the professor. In the first, he lies by saying that he did kill people in Vietnam, fulfilling the professor's fantasy image of him. Then the narrator submits a brief anecdote about a character called Ralph the Duck, in which the tiny, helpless Ralph is sheltered by his mother, for an assignment called "Rhetoric and Persuasion." The professor gives him a grade of D. While they discuss the paper, the red-haired student arrives at the professor's office for what is clearly a romantic assignation. These two moments cement both the narrator's opinion of the professor and the student's credentials as a confused and misused young woman.
These matters come to a head during a winter storm, when the narrator must traverse a dangerous road to reach a quarry above campus, where the young woman has gone after taking an overdose of pills. He finds her and, with a combination of physical effort and talk, gets her to the hospital. His chief rhetorical ploy is to elaborate on his Vietnam lie in an attempt to convince her not to die. The irony is not lost on him. He also reveals that he and Fanny once had a child, thereby connecting this girl, who is someone's child, with the girl they lost. When he returns home, he and Fanny discuss what will become of the young woman when she recovers, and what her family will do for her. Fanny, who loves and even admires him despite his shortcomings, asks how he got the girl down to safety. He says he used rhetoric and persuasion, and she tells him to go in before class to get the professor to raise his grade.