Truth is an important concern in the narration of The Sweet Hereafter. Different characters conceptualize the truth in different ways. Truth, loss tragedy and blame all happens so fast in this small town called Sam Dent. Dolores Driscoll who play the main character of The Sweet Hereafter bears so much pain and distress. Dolores is the a bus driver in Sam Dent. Dolores has a husband who suffered from a stroke and two adult sons. She has a bus that she drives and also maintains a 50-seat school bus herself. She makes getting up every morning to pick up kids in her town her duty as she transport them to school and home safely. Dolores begins to start her route, as she leave out on this cold morning. Before leaving out she would update her husband with the weather forecast. it was 17 degrees. "Too Cold" Dolores wasn't quite sure if the bus would start in that tempature, but it did. Dolores …show more content…
Dolores is focusing on the road, and see something that appears to look like a dog running across the road. "A dog—it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw." "It was like a ghost of a dog I saw, a reddish-brown blur, much smaller than a deer" Dolores stated (1). Fourteen children losses their life due to Dolores trying to avoid hitting something she see in the road. Dolores attends the memorials of the fourteen children who lost their life. She sets in the back to grieve alone.
Dolores made this statment "It's just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right"(15)Dolores says, "All over town there were empty houses and trailers for sale that last winter had been homes with families in them.A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways as a family does. It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals" (236). This accident has affected the whole town that will have a hard time to repaired