Lesson_Two_Discovery_of_a_Father

Background Information

1. The U.S. Civil War

It was waged from April 1861 until April 1865. The war was precipitated by the succession of eleven Southern states during 1860 and 1861and their formation of the Confederate States of America (the Confederate) under President Jefferson Davis. The Southern states had feared that the new president, Abraham Lincoln, who had been elected in 1860, and Northern politicians would block the expansion of slavery and endanger the existing slaveholding system. The North had a growing manufacturing sector and small farms using free labor, while the South’s economy was based on large farms (plantations) using slave labor. Therefore, whether to keep the previous slavery system or not turned out to be one of the major keys of the Civil War. Both the Union and the Confederate suffered a lot during the War that contributed to big economic loss and great casualty to them. On April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse, Lee, general-in-chief of the Confederate States army, surrendered his Confederate forces, signaling an end to the Civil War. Text Organization

1) Part I (Paras 1-7): My father’s showing off attracted the others in our town, but I

was disappointed.

Part II (Paras 8-22): The stories were told by my father.

Part III (Paras 23-25): My mother understood my father but I disgusted him for his

irresponsibility when we were broke.

Part IV (Paras 26-41): Finally, I could understand my father through a swimming

experience on a rainy night.

2) Part 1 (paras. 1-25): Description of father’s image before the discovery Part 2 (paras.26-41): How the boy “discovered” a father. Text Analysis

1. General Analysis

 Plot : the discovery of a father  Setting : on a rainy night

 Protagonists : “I” and “ father”

 Theme of the story: This is a story about an interesting character told by his son

who later became a well-known writer. With well-selected anecdotes and using the tone of a little boy, the author gives a vivid character sketch of his father whom he used to despise but gradually learns to understand and appreciate when he grows up. 2. Writing Skills

Discovery of a Father is a moving narrative passage. The author relates his change of feelings to his father in a schoolboy’s strain, which goes from the previous disappointment and disgust to the later understanding to him. In order to project the

reasons of his negative feelings to his father, he gives an account of his father’s absurd, terrible and ridiculous behavior, and moreover, he describes his father as a fool, a windbag, and a liar. All these changed after a swimming experience with his father on a rainy night, which made him have a feeling of closeness to his father, and be glad to be the son of his father.

The passage is strikingly affecting and impressive due to the following writing skills:

First, the author employs a lot of colloquial expressions. It looks as if the author was just in front of the reader, and they were having a personal, face-to-face, and relaxed conversation. This informal tone and straightforward style undoubtedly shorten the distance between the author and the reader.

Second, the employment of diverse adjectives and nouns helps to convey the change of the boy’s feelings to his father, some adjectives like “funny, terrible, ridiculous, queer,…”; some nouns like “fool, windbag, bitterness, wonder, strangeness, closeness and dignity”. In addition, the author doesn’t tell us directly what kind of a man his father was, but rather, he lists some specific and vivid incidents. All these help draw the outline of both a son and a father in an easy and natural way.

Third, the ending part of the passage is characterized by the use of symbolism. The raining night with lightning, darkness, wind and the heavy rain suggest the great difficulty the family got into. The father’s action which led the son to swim to the edge of the pond indicates his determination and perseverance to fight against the darkness and struggle for the new life. The profound philosophy of life based on the simple story between the father and son makes the passage take on a deep and far-reaching connotation.

3. Go over the last scene carefully and draw students’ attention to the use of symbols and the meanings between lines.

First, there was the setting – a wet night, his father back home after being away for two or three weeks, with his clothes dripping. The fact that he sat in a chair for a long time with the saddest look on his face showed that he was not the irresponsible happy-go-lucky person his son had thought him to be. He was not a windbag either because for a long time he did not utter a word. He just looked at his son closely. He was so serious in fact that the boy felt afraid. We can guess what was going on in this man’s mind at that moment. He was ashamed because he had not been able to give his son what he needed, and he was worried because he loved his son.

The swimming had an important symbolic value. Father and son, completely naked, striking out together in the dark. The boy suddenly saw his father as a dignified man, powerful, loving, and ready to face the harsh life. Through the swimming his father seemed to be communicating with him, trying to give him courage and strength. Slowly the boy began to understand that his father was not foolish. He was just too generous and too kind-hearted. He was not a clown, he was just a natural actor, and he loved life and loved people around him. He was popular because everybody knew that he was a nice man and he could “liven up” the dull life of the sleepy little town. Above all, he was not a windbag. He was just a born storyteller, a born writer. Now the son came to realize that what he used to consider ridiculous about his father

actually were proof of the old man’s rich imagination and rare talent.

Towards the end of the text, the author said that now he knew that his father “was a story-teller as I was to be”. It means that looking back, he realized that he himself had become a story writer because of his father’s influence, because he had his father’s genes of literary creation. This article therefore should be taken as dedicated to the memory of his father. 4. Writing Devices

1) Syntactic Anaphora (Repetition of Beginning Words) Example 1:

It was a feeling of closeness. It was something strange. It was as though there were only we two in the world. It was as though I had been jerked suddenly out of my world of the schoolboy, out of a world in which I was ashamed of my father. (This is the most common kind of sentence repetition.) Example 2:

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought that few people know what secrecy there is in the young, under terror. I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; … (C. Dickens: Great Expectations)

(The repetition of the words brings out vividly the extent of the boy’s terror, increased by the fear that he might not succeed in keeping his promise.) 2) Syntactic Epiphora (Repetition of Ending Words) Example 1:

It was as though I had been jerked suddenly out of my world of the schoolboy, out of a world in which I was ashamed of my father. Example 2:

And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them; the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them. They welded them, united them… (John Steinbeck: The Grapes of wrath)