"The Victims" by Sharon Olds - Internal Structure

The Victims from the narrator’s point of view sets up the plight of a mother and child who ruthlessly bashes on her former husband for his years of abuse and neglect. The mother and children revel in the father’s demise. They celebrate his firing because it symbolized all that was wrong with him. His job (suit) was like a carcass, he had secretaries and his bourbon taken away (Adultery and Alcoholism). However at the end, the tone shifts and sympathy arises from the narrator observation of bums on the street. He/She realizes that the father was just as much a victim in his fall as they were his victims. In order to fall, someone had to take.

Throughout the poem, the narrator seems to have grown up. The second section starts with “Now I” as if it was years later when the narrator has his epiphany while passing bums in doorways. Thus the poem is organized into two sections, one when younger following the divorce and the other later in life (perhaps when the narrator is an adult) when the narrator has matured to realize the grey nature of the word “victim.”