What were Alan Pangborns circumstances concerning the death of his wife and kid?

[kesh]

what i'm looking for in this post is for someone to say what his wife did before the car accident that killed her and her son. Something about her unclipping her seatbelt and her sons, but that might've not happened because...... i dont remember. please someone set the scene. I've been thinking about this lately.

[since75]

when Alan goes in the store, Gaunt had a tv and vcr set up for Alan to 'watch what happened' it showed his wife and son without seatbelts, the crash etc, and tried to make Alan think it was her fault and she deliberately killed them both.. but Alan knew better etc etc it is toward the end of the book and I might have a few details kinda wrong, but that is the scene

[GNTLGNT]

The smokin' cabunny is keerect...

[kesh]

Right Since75. But what was Alan conflicted with exactly? What where the CIRCUMSTANCEs involved in his wife and sons death? Not concerning the video gaunt showed him. The guilty "voice" that Alan sometimes had would keep him up at night and would tell him it was his fault that his wife and son died. That's when Alan tried to piece together his wife's death; if whether she buckled the kid at first then got up to unbuckle him or...... so on and so forth (i don't remember). that's what i'm trying to figure out. what was Alan exactly conflicted with that didn't quite add up?

[sk_fan_since_91]

Alan's guilt stems from his fear that his wife committed suicide and that he could have prevented it if only he had noticed her migraine symptoms. A couple months before his wife died, Alan noticed that she had been taking hundreds of aspirins a week. When he asked her if they were for her headaches, she told him the bottle had fallen into the sink by accident and that she had flushed the missing aspirin melted down the drain. Alan might have "interrogated" her further (he was a cop) but he was still shaken by his run-in with George Stark from The Dark Half. He thinks that if he had asked his wife more questions, he could have convinced her to go to the doctor and that a CAT scan would have disclosed the tumor.

Alan's guilt is compounded by the mysterious circumstances of the accident. His wife always wore her seatbelt when she drove but she was not wearing it the day of the accident. This loose end caused Alan to fear that his wife had in fact committed suicide by purposely crashing the car (presumably because of delusions caused by the tumor). The other possibility--that his wife simply had seizure that caused her to stomp on the gas pedal and crash the car--was just as likely but it was impossible to tell once she and their son were killed. But the seatbelt continued to haunt Alan because it suggested that his wife had unbuckled her seatbelt before crashing the car (remember Alan's dream when everything he picks up in Gaunt's store is a charred belt-buckle from the accident? Chilling.)

**SPOILERS**

Alan's "needful thing" turns out to be a purported videotape of his wife and son's accident. In the tape, Gaunt (falsely) frames Ace Merrill as the murderer of Alan's family (in the tape, he ran them off the road with his car). But once Alan confronts Gaunt, he realizes that the videotape showed his wife wearing her seatbelt at the time of the accident. After talking with Polly (who also discovered a similar mistake in her own dealings with Gaunt), he realizes the tape is obviously a fraud. He and Polly then cast Gaunt out of town. The book ends, IIRC, with Alan admitting that he will never know the real circumstances of his wife's death but that he'll find a way to live with it. So in the end, the book leaves the mystery of the accident unsolved.

[Merchickety]

Actually, I just finished reading this book today, so that scene is a bit fresher in my mind. Alan thought his wife had killed herself and her son by unbuckling her seatbelt and crashing into a tree. She had an undiagnosed brain tumor, and the doctors told him she must have had a seizure and crashed. However, because she always wore her seatbelt except for the time she crashed, he thinks the brain tumor caused her to want to commit suicide and take her son with her. He imagines that his wife may have possibly tried to unbuckle her son's seatbelt before the crash to ensure that he died, too. Alan feels guilty, because he thinks he should have known something was wrong before it got to that point. When he goes into Needful Things to confront Gaunt, there as a TV and VCR set up, and a videotape on top of the TV with a letter that claims his questions about his wife's death will be answered. The videotape shows his wife being run off the road by Ace Merrill. He later realized that the video is a fake, because his wife was wearing a seatbelt in the video.

[leftrightwriterman3613]

Referencing the **SPOILERS**: Leaving that particular 'mystery' unsolved elicited sympathy from me for both Polly and Alan; because of Polly's arthritis. That was my take on it, anyway