Cause And Effect - Analysis

A bitter mercy: death as escape

The poem’s hard claim is that suicide can be less an act of aggression than an act of escape: the best sometimes die by their own hand simply to get away. Bukowski’s phrasing refuses romantic softness. The best is blunt praise, but it’s immediately followed by the stark mechanics of self-killing, as if moral worth and self-destruction can sit in the same sentence without canceling each other out. The small phrase just to get away lands like a grim simplification: not a grand philosophy, not a speech, just an exit.

The survivors’ confusion, and the poem’s accusation

Then the poem pivots to the living: those left behind / can never quite understand. That never quite matters; it suggests partial comprehension is possible, but not the full emotional reality of wanting to leave life. The tone shifts here from describing the dead to scrutinizing the survivors, and it’s not gentle. The poem implies the living take the act personally, because they ask why anybody / would ever want to / get away / from them. The final word them tightens the focus: the survivors turn an existential escape into a relational slight, as if the dead were fleeing a particular circle rather than pain, despair, or the world.

Repetition that turns escape into a verdict

The repeated phrase get away does two jobs at once. First, it gives the dead a motive that’s simple and human: to leave, to be uncornered. But repetition also becomes a kind of verdict on the community around the speaker: if the survivors hear get away and immediately think from them, it hints at a self-involvement so strong it blocks empathy. The poem holds a sharp tension between compassion for the dead (they wanted relief) and critique of the living (they reframe that relief as rejection).

The uncomfortable question the poem leaves us with

When the survivors can’t imagine why someone would want to leave, is that innocence or blindness? Bukowski’s closing thought suggests something harsher: that not understanding may be a way of protecting the self, because admitting the real reasons for get away would require the living to see how little their love, presence, or normality actually helped.