How do two of the works you have studied portray the struggle to be understood?

1. The circumstances of the father’s conflict in FS

2.The circumstances of the father’s conflict in S

3.The characterization of the father in FS showing the struggle to be understood

4. The characterization of the father in S showing the struggle to be understood

5. Father in FS expresses emotion through cooking and indirectness

6. Father in S expresses emotion through violence and alcoholism and anger

7. Final ability to overcome struggle - FS father’s dinner and Watanabe

8. Final ability to overcome struggle - S father’s final wishes

Sample Paper:

It is no secret that many males struggle to express their emotions and thus struggle to be truly
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understood. Cultural norms for masculinity sometimes inhibit males from truly expressing
themselves and sharing their inner thoughts and feelings with others. The real victims many times
are other family members. Family Supper by Kazuo Ishiguro is the story of a rather disjointed family
with a son who comes back from his stay in the USA to visit his rather distant and emotionally cut-off
intro
father. The father in this story clearly struggles to share his affection for his family and his desire to book + intro
have the family together and intact. In Stones by Timothy Findley, a young father comes back from
war a coward, having failed to act in the line of fire. His torment and shame and his inability to
clearly express his true feelings and receive treatment for his trauma are the subjects of this
heartbreaking story. While the circumstances of their struggles are vastly different, the two fathers
in Family Supper and Stones both struggle to articulate their feelings and cope with their emotions.
This struggle has dire consequences for the family dynamic and in both cases results in
fragmentation and discord. thesis statement

The circumstances that revolve around each father’s struggle to be understood are vastly different.
The father in Family Supper struggles to express his concern about the loss of traditional culture in
point Japan and the threat that Westernization represents to the old way of life in his country. Ishiguro
towards uses the fugu as a symbol of traditional Japan as well as the kimono and allusions to the samurai.
one book
The choice of the setting of Kamakura is also significant as the city was an imperial city and has many
samurai associations. All of these symbols are clear markers of ancient Japan, something the father
values greatly but is not understood by his son.

Conversely, the father in Stones struggles to communicate about his own failings and his mental
illness associated with trauma. His situation is much more dire than the father in Family Supper

connecting auth with gq

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since he turns to violence and his young children and wife are anxious about his and their well-
and
contrast being. The dark atmosphere that pervades the house and the secrecy revolving around his return all
point to the father’s failure to express himself. Thus, these circumstances, while different, pose
unique barriers for each man to be understood by his family.

These circumstances are reflected in the characterization of the father in the opening scene
of Family Supper which shows him as a man with his guard up, unable to be understood. The
exposition of the story shows his struggle to be understood as a proud Japanese man. The narrator,
the son, remarks that his father was a “formidable-looking man with a large stony jaw and furious
black eyebrows.” This rich imagery shows him as a man with a very tough exterior and definitely not
one to express affection or emotion. Ishiguro describes him as having “pure samurai blood” and
again shows him to be traditional and honor-bound. The initial dialogue is stilted and awkward as he
tells his son about the collapse of the firm and the suicide of his partner Watanabe. His attempt to
inform his son that Watanabe was “a man of principle’ again characterizes him as a man who values
saving face and someone who is guided by appearances. His values are not supported or
“understood” by the narrator and this struggle continues throughout the story.

In contrast to the father in Family Supper, the father in Stones is characterized as passionate,
lively, and communicative in the opening of the story, perhaps to illustrate the drastic effect of
contrast World War 2. Unlike in Family Supper which takes place over only a few hours, Stones is a story that
spans 15 years. Thus, we see in Stones a man who is broken by the war and his failures in Dieppe.
After his return, Findley describes him as someone with “his head bowed and his shoulders rounded
forward.” This imagery makes it seem like he has shrunk. He is clearly not “formidable” like the
father in Family Supper. His failure to be understood as a victim of PTSD continues as the narrator
feels the silence in the house and feels like there is a dark secret. Like the narrator in Family Supper
who feels the tension and unspoken secrets regarding his mother’s death, the narrator in Stones
perceives that there is something wrong but the father is unable to share his secret and be
understood. Thus, the initial characterization of both fathers shows them as guarded and broken
men who cannot communicate effectively with their children. The results are the loss of family unity
in both cases.

Since they have difficulty being understood verbally, both men find other means to express
their feelings and be understood. The father in Family Supper, being a stoic Japanese man,
expresses his love and affection for his children by cooking a meal of fugu fish. This fugu is used as a
compare strong motif in the entire story and presents a clear symbol of Japanese traditional culture but
underneath this symbol lies toxicity and potential death for someone who eats it when it is prepared
incorrectly. Perhaps Ishiguro is alluding to some of the conflicts that exist surrounding Japanese
traditions like suicide due to shame. In any case, the father’s cooking is his way to express his
feelings and perhaps subtly reinforces Japanese tradition. The cooking of the fish thus underscores
the father’s struggle to share his feelings with his children.

While the father in Family Supper chooses to show his emotions through a home-cooked meal, the
father in Stones resorts to violence and alcohol to suppress his emotions. The father’s emotional
outbursts seen in the dialogue, his rash actions, and his violent attacks on his family are all signs of
recconect the father’s struggle to be understood as a victim of war. In a dramatic scene, he attacks his own
+ contrast wife with a hammer which again symbolizes his rage. Whether it be poison fish or violent attacks
with a hammer, both fathers are unable to be understood by their family and thus use other means
to cope.
 The struggle to be understood for both men actually does reach some closure in both stories
reconnect and both men finally are able to express their feelings to their sons, the narrators in both stories.
+ Towards the end of the story, when his son asks him if he (the father) thought Watanabe was right in
compare killing himself and his family to save face after the decline of the business, the father remarks that
“there are other things besides work.” This dialogue and very indirect tone help to show that the
father does value his children and does value family. This might foreshadow that he will perhaps
accept his son and his new life and that there is the possibility to change. It is here that the father
shows that he is indeed different from Watanabe and that he might reconsider some of the ancient
samurai customs.

Similarly, the father in Stones speaks to his son and asks his son’s forgiveness for what he has done.
This impactful moment is his moment to be understood by the only son who still supports him. He
conclu
asks his son to bury him at Dieppe among all of his fallen comrades. The narrator remarks that by
sion
doing so, his father will, at last, be, “A stone among stones.” Here Findley is using the stones of
Dieppe as a symbol for fallen soldiers and by spreading his father’s ashes among the stones, his
father will find peace. Thus both men, towards the end of the story, finally find understanding and
communicate essential truths to their sons.

Both men in these stories face immense challenges in being understood by their families and
their communities. They both find themselves lost in a sense. The father in Family Supper is losing
final
conclusion the traditional way of life and he is losing his family in the process. The father in Stones is losing his
place in his community and losing the dignity he had prior to the war. As older men and as fathers,
they are losing their grip and it is not until their sons are ready that they can finally be understood.
Although both stories end on a melancholy note, both authors are sending a critical message to their
readers about families and their struggles and the potential for understanding.
reconnect with thesis
Authors sometimes tell their stories in a non-linear fashion. Compare how and for what reasons the
authors of at least two works that you have read have told their stories in a non-linear fashion.

Readers are often intrigued by war stories, because they want to know if people can persevere in
adverse circumstances. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt
Vonnegut both show how soldiers struggle to deal with war and its aftermath unsuccessfully. The
authors both use a disjointed and non-linear narration to show readers how soldiers remember,
experience and suffer from the horrors of war.

Both novels are written by authors who remember their experiences of one war in the context of
another war, using non-linear narrative structures. In 1990, during the Gulf War in Kuwait, Tim
O’Brien wrote the novel The Things They Carried, which is about the Vietnam War of the 1960s.
O’Brien, who is a Vietnam veteran, writes as a soldier who is traumatised by the violence that he
experienced, mixing ‘truth-story’ with ‘happening-truth’ to create a work that is neither truth nor
fiction, neither memoir nor novel. For example, one chapter, called ‘Love’, is about how O’Brien
meets with another veteran, Jimmy Cross, years after the war to drink coffee and gin and remember
the atrocities for which they could not forgive themselves. His friend tells O’Brien about a woman he
loved, Martha. But his love was unrequited, because Martha was scared to be with a veteran who
had experienced such violence, and this left him heartbroken. There seems to be an inescapable
stigma surrounding Vietnam veterans. This story within a story shows the reader how war never
stops damaging the lives of its veterans, long after it is over.

Through a similar use of frame narration, Kurt Vonnegut shows how the effects of World War II have
haunted its veterans even after it ended. The novel, which is semi-autobiographical, is written at the
height of the Vietnam War in 1969. Vonnegut begins Slaughterhouse-Five with a dialogue between
him and a fellow veteran O’Hare and his wife Mary. O’Hare’s wife is angry with Vonnegut for writing
a novel about the war, because she assumes that he will glorify war. Vonnegut promises her, though,
that his novel will discourage young men from fighting in wars. He explains that it will be short and
jumbled because there is nothing intelligent one can say about a massacre. Furthermore, he
dedicates the novel to her, which is a clear sign to readers that he aims to uphold his promise to
Mary. In the context of 1967, when this work was written, the protest movement against the
Vietnam War was growing. This use of frame narration shows the reader how Vonnegut finds war
senseless. This extra layer of narration is very similar to O’Brien’s way of telling his stories in The
Things They Carried, which the author uses for the same purpose of showing the adverse effects of
war on its veterans and warning against the senselessness of the Gulf War. The non-linear, broken
narration, which includes veterans remembering war, acts as a reminder to people how the
atrocities of war live on.

The disjointed and non-linear narrative is also used in both novels as a way of showing readers how
soldiers experience and deal with extremely violent situations. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien
remembers killing a young Vietnamese man, distancing himself from the violent action by describing
the gruesome destruction of the young man’s body without emotions. The victim’s eye was shot
through like a “star”, his body was “oatmeal” and parts of his face were “missing”. Instead of writing
about his feelings of guilt and disgust, O’Brien uses imagery. Furthermore, he fantasizes about the
young Vietnamese man’s youth, growing up at school, possibly being teased by others for his love of
calculus. This flashback is contrasted with the description of a butterfly landing on the young man’s
nose. O’Brien’s platoon mate rationalises that if O’Brien hadn’t killed the boy, someone else would
have. This use of dialogue, imagery and non-linear structure allows O’Brien to retell this violent act
without facing his pain or showing remorse for killing the young man.

The main character of Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim, uses similar though different devices for
coping with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Billy Pilgrim, a fictional character, is, like Vonnegut
himself, a WWII veteran, Prisoner of War (POW) and survivor of the bombing of Dresden. The novel
ends with the protagonist climbing out of a mountain of dead bodies. The imagery is very gruesome
and graphic. Every time Billy puts one dead body behind him, another appears on the horizon. In a
sense, this is an analogy of war itself, as Vonnegut suggests that once one war finishes another one
begins. “And so it goes,” the narrator states throughout the novel after someone is killed, which is
frequently. This passive phrase suggests that death and destruction are inevitable. The language
makes the reader feel as helpless as the protagonist but willing to accept the atrocities for what they
are. In a similar way O’Brien adopts a helpless tone throughout The Things They Carried by using
phrases such as “this is true” to suggest that the horrible events should be accepted for what they
are. Just as O’Brien’s mind wanders and scenes flash forward or backward every time there is a
violent situation, so too does Billy’s. Billy believes that he was abducted by aliens, the
Tralfamadorians, who taught him to time travel, using “the fourth dimension.” This allows him to
look back at the horrors of war as just one time in his life and also to flash forward to other, better
times. This device for coping with posttraumatic stress disorder is more extreme than O’Brien’s use
of imagination and “truth-story,” though it serves the same function. The non-linear storylines of
both works show their readers how veterans deal with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Finally, both works use non-linear structures to show readers how wars inflict mental damage to
veterans. In The Things They Carried, several characters are depicted as mentally instable. One story
is about Mitchell Sanders, who went on patrol and eventually went crazy after hearing strange
noises, like talking monkeys, cocktail parties and chanting. Even after he ordered for the whole
region to be burned down by air strikes, he still heard the noises. Eventually Sanders admits to
O’Brien that he had embellished parts of his story, which makes the reader question Sander’s sanity
and reliability as a narrator.

In a similar way, Billy Pilgrim is insane and Vonnegut’s story is nothing but fantasy. While Kurt
Vonnegut claims that “most” of his story about Billy is true, it would be impossible for anyone to
have such knowledge of another man’s thoughts and actions. What’s more, Vonnegut’s story about
Billy’s encounters with the Tralfamadorians, his sexual contact with a movie star and his time
travelling must be fantasy, despite Vonnegut’s very matter-of-fact tone. There are hints that Billy is
perceived as crazy by other characters, such as his optometry clients and his daughter, who finds
him freezing in a house with a broken boiler. The reader, however, suspends all disbelief in
Vonnegut’s story, because it is based on the premise that nothing could be more absurd than
surviving the firebombing of Dresden, which killed over 135,000 people in one night. In fact
Vonnegut himself survived the bombing as is described in this fictional tale, as a prisoner in a meat
locker. Vonnegut and O’Brien both earn a certain right to tell fantastical, non-linear stories that
comment critically on war, because they both survived the horrors of the war.

To conclude, both novels use a non-linear, disjointed narration to show the reader how veterans
remember, experience and suffer from war. The novels are written in the context of one war about
another war as a warning that war will always be horrific. Both Vonnegut and O’Brien mix fact and
fiction as a means of making the senselessness of war sensible to readers.