There are
many ways in which the author makes
the relationship between the father and son in this short
story so memorable.
The most obvious way is through the dialogue between the father and the son.
The structure of the story also helps to make the relationship memorable, as do the
son's
conversations with his uncle and the motif of death that runs
throughout the story. You might
organize an essay plan into sections
according to these different ways employed by the
author.
This is the approach I have taken below. I have endeavoured to offer
a few ideas for each possible section, and I have included also some key quotations that
you
might use in each section. I hope you find the ideas
helpful.
Dialogue
The dialogue between
the father and son in the story
suggests that their relationship is somewhat
fraught and unhappy. At the beginning of the story,
for example, the father
takes an opportunity to deride the son's relationship with the uncle,
and the
son, in return, takes the opportunity to deride the father's habit of poring over
the
obituaries and the advertisements for teachers in the newspaper. This
retort from the son is
described as a "counter thrust," implying that the
father and son's conversations are
like a fencing match, with each trying to
score points against the other.
However, there are also
within the story sections of dialogue which suggest a more
tender,
affectionate side to the relationship between the father and the son. When, for
example,
the son offers to make coffee and sandwiches for the father, the
father replies, "Good
man," and offers to "give [the son] a hand."
If you read
through the story again, you will be able to find plenty
of other examples of dialogue, some of
which imply that the relationship
between the father and the son is fraught and some of which
imply that there
is, nonetheless, some affection still remaining between the two.
The Embedded Narrative
The story begins with what is called
a frame
narrative before going back in time into what is called an embedded
narrative, or, more
commonly, a flashback. Within this embedded narrative we
learn that, one year previous, the
father asked the son's permission to marry
again. The father seems hurt when the son has no
objections. He seems hurt
because the son seems indifferent to the memory of his mother and
because the
son's indifference makes the father feel "as if his life [has] been brutally
severed from the other life" he had with the son's mother.
This
flashback helps us to understand why the relationship between
the father and the son seems so
fraught in the frame narrative. The moment
when the father asked the son for his permission to
remarry was perhaps the
moment when their relationship started to become as fraught as it seems
in
the frame narrative. This perhaps helps to make the relationship so memorable because it
is a
situation which so many readers will be personally familiar with and
will, therefore, be able to
empathize with.
The
Uncle
Through his conversations with
his uncle, the son
reveals the extent of his feelings toward his father. The son tells his uncle
that his father "bores him" and that he would like to live with the uncle rather
than
the father. "With his uncle," he says, "everything seem[s] open."
The
implication here is that he feels that, with his father, everything is
"closed," or
repressed, and this seems to ring true when we remember the
aforementioned fencingused to
describe the conversations between the father
and the son.
When discussing
with his uncle his father's
intention to remarry, the uncle says to the son:
any pair of imbeciles of age can go and take a marriage license out
and set about bringing up a child in the world, which is a much more complicated
activity than
driving an old car around!
The implication here is that
the uncle is criticizing the way his
nephew has been brought up. In this analogy, the father is
likely one of the
"imbeciles," and thus the inference is that the uncle does not
approve of the
way that his nephew has been brought up, possibly because of the closed,
repressed nature of the relationship alluded to above.
The
relationship
between the father and the son is memorable in part because of
what is not said between them,
and it is mostly through the son's
conversations with the uncle that we learn the extent of what
is unsaid. For
your essay, you might like to look at what is revealed through these
conversations about the son's real feelings toward the father.
Death
There is throughout the story a recurring motif of
death.
Indeed, the story begins and ends with the description of the dead
rabbit that the son discovers
on the golf course. When the son sees his
father with his prospective new wife, Miss McCabe, he
remarks that the sight
"disturbed him." He is disturbed because he interprets his
father's
relationship with this woman as a "defense...too brittle against the only end
of
life." In other words, the father, from the son's perspective, is trying
to guard himself
against the loneliness of old age and impending
death.
Toward the end of the
story, the father visits Miss
McCabe in her hotel room where she is recovering from a heart
attack. He
quickly decides to abandon her, explaining to the son that he doesn't want to be in
a
relationship with a woman who might die at any moment. The son understands
that "it was the
stoat the father had glimpsed in Miss McCabes hotel room,
and [that] he was running."
Thisis interesting because it suggests that the
father is running from death. In the metaphor,
the father is the rabbit. He
is relentlessly pursued by death in the same way as the rabbit was
relentlessly pursued by the stoat.
This revelation, that the father
is
fleeing from death, arguably makes the relationship between the father and
son more memorable
because the son's hostility toward the father becomes more
questionable. We might think that the
son should be more sympathetic toward
his father than he is, and we might question why he is
not.
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