My Father's House

The third song on the second side of Nebraska is, like “Mansion on the Hill,” an architectural metaphor but in this case the setting is psychological rather than social or historical. After two songs on side two set in the narrative present, the narrator once again mines his own past, a memory of a dream, and makes a statement about his relationship with his father in the narrative present. In the contexts of both Bruce’s psychological and autobiographical development and his development with the use of place in his songs, this song represents two aspects of a major paradigm shift in Bruce’s thinking: his relationship with his father has matured from the trauma of “Adam Raised a Cain” and the separation of “Independence Day” to self-realization and acceptance; and, his use of landscape in his writing has matured from the metaphorical escape routes of earlier songs such as “Born to Run” and “Wreck on the Highway” to an inhabited space, a landscape shared with the listener, lived out in a sociohistorical and psychological context.

The song begins as a narrative of a dream, a dream that Bruce claimed (at the Christic Institute concert of 1990) haunted him for years, a archetypal story of being chased by the devil in a forest of pines to a house that, like the Mansion on the Hill, is “shining hard and bright”; however, in the dream the house is the site of refuge, where the narrator “fell shaking into his arms.” It is unclear whether the narrator goes into the house during his dream, but when he awakens, he realizes the refuge is unattainable. The “hard things that pulled us apart” are gone, and he tells the listener—a “sir” who may be the same person as the listener in Mansion on the Hill—a short anecdote to emphasize the lost opportunities for resolution with his father. In the last two stanzas, the dream becomes real as the narrator tells of visiting the house and realizing that not only is it behind a “chained door” and occupied by a woman strange to him, but that the guilt and remorse, the “sins” of his relationship with his father “lie unatoned” on the road, where the narrator can only look up to the house which calls him to forgiveness. In the end, the narrator is “cold and alone,” unable as an adult to expiate his adolescent actions, which remain and “stand like a beacon” in his psyche, and in his neighborhood, too. The guilt, anger, and pain that has filled the narrator’s life, expressed in the memories of phantom drives to look at mansions with his father, drives that Bruce has described in his introductory monologues (Marsh 371) and in the spaces of the house, which he has described over and over in his concert monologues in different, but always personal, contexts (302), are important elements of what Marsh has called his "father songs." In the end, one gets the feeling that the narrator of “My Father’s House” will drive his children by an unattainable place, recreating his childhood for the next generation.