Along the Frontage Road - Essay Example

The story initially begins with the narrator’s recollection of the ritual of plucking pumpkins with his own dad when he was a kid himself. He also remembers how with the precision of a surgeon his father would carve the pumpkins so that they could be used for Halloween. Here too we find the nostalgic tingle that is associated with the past days. The narrator tries to connect and judge the significance of the happiness of those days when he used to come with his father to find out the pumpkins to prepare for Halloween and this day when he has come with his son to this barren patch to search for a pumpkin to lay off their mind the funeral that awaits them back in their house.

We can realize the feeling and the tension that is coursing between both the narrator and his son Nicky. The pumpkin lot represent to the narrator Nicky’s father a kind of nostalgic shelter of happiness to which he tried to escape to mitigate the inner torment and loss he felt at the death of his seventeen weeks old daughter, Kate. He compares it and finds it highly unfavorable from his older times as he remembers his childhood days of pumpkin picking which were filled with joy and excitement.

However, both he and his son Nicky had escaped into this barren land to search for salvation in the form of a pumpkin to relive their heavy heart, which was filled with, grieve at their mutual loss. This was the reason that the narrator did not find this particular pumpkin patch as attractive and joyous like the one he had visited during his own childhood carefree days. The story revolves around the replacement of the loss. Therefore, both the narrator and his son Nicky had come to escape from the loss they had experienced and to fill this void with some good memories or ablest some different memories.

The small pumpkin becomes Nicky’s way of coping with loss. It was to him the