The boy’s mother and Ralph see the grandfather as sour and cantankerous, he is always argumentative (at dinner times the grandfather would continuously argue with Ralph) whereas the boy sees him as weary and ailed. The boy would watch him with satisfaction when he was in his shed with his chemical experiments: symbolic of the fact that the grandfather was ‘in control’ and in his ‘domain’ whilst he was in the shed. This is ironic as you must be in control in Chemistry or things go wrong, again, symbolic of the fact that he is no longer in control of the relationship – Ralph has come into the relationship and he is gradually losing control. However, he is still in control of his chemical experiments, one of the only things that he has left.
The boy sees Ralph as the intruder into the existing relationship. There is a sense of jealousy as previously everything was fine between the three and they all had a bond of love, until someone ‘intruded’ into the relationship, upsetting the otherwise fine balance. Ralph also begins to move deeper into the mother’s heart – this also makes the boy jealous so he plans a scheming plot to ‘ruin’ Ralph’s face so that he cannot be loved any more: he is going to throw acid into his face so that it is distorted and deformed.
The boy decides that killing Ralph would be pointless: he mentions death as ‘a deceptive business’. Also, the memories of someone and the love for them live on even after they die – which would mean Ralph would be loved and remembered after death (like the boy’s father was) whereas if he did not kill him, then there would be no such thing as memories and love for him, at least not by his mother as there would be nothing about him to love. This is ironic because the grandfather kills himself using Prussic acid and the love for him from his daughter lives on.
The relationships between the family members are complicated – when Ralph enters the relationship he creates a lot of tension, tension that is finally resolved when the grandfather dies toward the end of the story.
At the end of the story, when the grandfather’s memorial service is held, the grandson, his mother and Ralph stand at the memorial – the boy mentions this as a ‘mock’ version of the trio that stood at his father’s memorial, himself, his mother and his father. This is symbolic as the boy’s use of language: ‘mock’ is implying that Ralph has intruded into the relationship and that he shouldn’t be there.
The last paragraph of the story is significant: the boy mentions when he visited the park and saw ‘a bottle of acid and the wreck of my launch’. I think that this is significant as these are two very important pieces of the story, they are two symbols: The acid represents both the grandfather and the effect of chemistry, the fact that you must balance an equation for it to work successfully (metaphor of relationship) and the ‘wreck’ of the boys launch is also symbolic of the relationship, the ‘wreck’ of the relationship: it had not gone the way that the boy wanted it to go, Ralph had intruded and his grandfather had passed away.
