Oedipus Showing Paternal Love in His StrollWith Shultz’s hand on his shoulder, Billy feels the “warmth” and the “weight, ” “like a father’s hand, ” “familiar, burdensome in its pride and his beaming appreciation in my face ” (299). Billy ales the most trustworthy person for Shultz, like a son. But this son, like Oedipus, betrays his father and marries his mother, Drew Preston in this novel, and has a child with her, just as Oedipus has children with his own es a father himself. The similarity of the novel’s plot to that of Oedipus’s story can be seen in Billy’s relationship with Shultz and Drew. Drew, as the white goddess, like those in Doctorow’s other novels — Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime, Phillis in The Book of Daniel, Norma in World’s Fair, Clara in Loon Lake, Mary Elizabeth in Horiggers off the process of the protagonist towards sexual maturity. The color “white ” is given great emphasis in the images like “white gloves, ” “white hand, ” “white tits, ” “white telephone, ” “white wine, ” “white fencing, ” “white dresses, ” “white anklets” and “white shoes” about this “white Miss Drew, ” a white goddess, incurring a e and naivety, of purity and blankness.
What is worth noting is，what brings Billy and Drew nearer to each other is their strolling, either in the city street or in the countryside. Here，wandering bees Billy’s way to get more intimate with the white goddess and to grow sexually mature. The daring walk from the hotel to the hill’s romantic setting makes Billy aware of the fact that Drew is actually younger than he has taken her to be，and gives hie of seeing her nude，the first chance being in her own apartment in New York. It is in their walk into the i makes them more intimate to each other and triggers his sexual fantasy about her. It is in their walk into the dark forest that coation. It is also in their walk to the middle of the bridge that Billy believes he wants to gain equality with her，a milestone which marks his anding of male-female relationships，as his initiation into mature manhood, also a deween being a son and being a lover. While Billy’s protection of Drew froel murder makes him more like a father who protects his own daughter. We see for Billy，capable of being a gangster，he is also capable of being a “father.”
The truth is that there has been the premonition of Drew’s pregnancy, which is shown in the text to be Billy’s instinctual finding: “I don’t know why but she (Drew) seems to move through the crowd with such care that I think of a woman with child” (241). As an “X” in Bererious goddess with all kinds of possibilities to coure.
The person right within Billy’s touch, however, is his own mother, whom he says he loves for “being innocent in the murderous world, ” suggesting the innocence of a child. With a strong sense of protecting his inated by the corrupted gang world, and from being disdained by the neighborhood people for having a gang boy, Billy swears that he will “take care of her as long as she lived ” (313). His mitment to his for her, is in a way siitted to Drew and protects Drew. He does admit the “terrifying resemblance ” between Drew and his mother: there are siiated love that made them inseparable.” So it seeh his birth mother, too, again an act of Oedipus who falls in love with his own mother. And when Billy and Drew’s baby is sent to his mother, she takes it easily as if expecting it, an evidence of the unification of Drew and her within herself. While the last scene of the novel in which Billy and his mother takes the baby in his carriage, walking along the Bathgate Avenue, much resembles a family with a father, a mother and a son, like Billy’s own family, who used to walk in this market before his father fled. As Billy says “my life as a boy was over” (322). Billy, again, takes the place of his birth father, much like the way he replaces his gang father Shultz, and bees father himself. Here we see, besides being the way to overcofidence, to calo be a means of camouflage, or to get more intimate with the white goddess, wandering, this ties a way of fathering, a way of showing paternal love to his own child.