Anthony Doerr The Caretaker Sparknotes

“For his first thirty-five years, Joseph Saleeby’s mother makes his bed and each of his meals; each morning she makes him read a column of the English dictionary, selected at random, before he is allowed to set foot outside.” Year thirty-five of Joseph’s life is a landmark because his mother disappears on her way to market—their country, Liberia, has been at war for five years—and never returns. After this, of course, she stops making his bed and his meals.
Anthony Doerr is given to what we might call the extended-play short story: instead of hours or days, years go by. “The Caretaker” is remarkable not only because of its temporal scope—if we count that first sentence, it covers thirty-six years—but also its geographical one. Although his mother brings him his lunch at the job he lightly embezzles from and tells him he is “making Liberia strong,” Joseph flees the country after she disappears. He has turned to trafficking in stolen goods; at the behest of rebel soldiers he fears will kill him, he shoots an innocent man. He sails for the Oregon coast, a place as naturally beautiful as his country is made ugly by men, and becomes a refugee.
As if civil war, exile, loss and shame weren’t enough, Doerr hurls even more objects into orbit and juggles them expertly. Joseph accepts a job as a caretaker at a wealthy home, but neglects his

Even his meals, apart from the house, become physical toil: “…eating…is a job, vaguely troubling, hardly satisfying.” Nothing in this story, not even Joseph’s homegrown therapy methods, is abstracted away from us. Doerr puts every automatic rifle, half-drunk martini, ripe melon, and finger-sign right in our