For One More Day by Mitch Albom - Literature review Example

For One More Day For One More Day is a touching story. Only a with great imagination can write a story like this. It tells us the story of the hardships in a family in a simple style. But gradually, the readers begin to realize that these hardships are there in every family, along with love, soft relationships, the inevitable errors, and finally with all the belated forgiveness. Matching to the content of the story is the beautiful style. The easy and quick reading it offers, its ability to engage the readers, and the lessons that emerge from the events are really very fantastic. Though the story is a little sentimental, it is morally great. Altogether, For One More Day, like Tuesdays with Morrie, has shown that the creative genius of Mitch Album, the author, is superb. A brief exploratory look at the story is the focus of this paper. Charley Benette, or Chick as he is dearly called, is the central character and narrator of the story. He was passing through a period of depression and has turned very alcoholic. He was working as a salesman, but has lost his job. He has left his family. In short, he has wrecked himself. One night he drives away and meets with an accident. He escapes. He comes out of the wreckage, climbs a water tower, and throws himself off. With a broken brain he walks home, and finds his mother there who had left him years ago. He gets one more day with his mother. This is the greatest day in his life. He confesses his past to his mother, which he wanted to do since his father had left her. There is a parallel in the life of both the father and the son. A cyclical pattern seems to emerge from the events in the family. An irresistible instinct in Chick to repeat the avoidable errors, by not learning from his father’s experience, is what the readers notice from these events in his life. He becomes an interesting case for the curious readers. As Chick moves backward into his past and unravels his secrets, we realize his limitations, which he unconsciously experienced in his childhood and during the adolescence period. As he brings his past to a close scrutiny, he finds that he should not have taken his mother for granted. He realizes the force of parental love in one’s life, but also regrets for its imposing power. The traumatic effect of the missed opportunities on him is unfortunately great. However, as he reexamines his own decisions and actions in the past, puzzling questions about the nature of love relationship between his father and mother surface. Why did they split up, he wonders? About the purity of love he received from his mother, he has absolutely no doubt. She is the “whole smothering mothering thing”. But he cannot understand why mothers support certain illusions about their children. The thought of his mother takes him to his father. His father’s assertion that “you can be a momma’s boy or daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both” had been the deciding factor in his life. He chose to stay with his daddy, and the day he went to him was the day when his mother died of a massive heart attack. That also marked the beginning of his ruin, the cause of drowning himself in drinks. That fatal event marked the turning point in his life. Its impact was life-long; it kept on haunting him even after he became a father. He kept wondering how little he knew of his mother. Filled with the accumulated guilt, Chick longed for one more day. He got it at last, but he was then neither in this world nor in the other. The description of this floating self of Chick is the essence of the story. The corrections he intended to make in his life spill out from his unconscious self into the form of a beautiful story. The real cause of Chick’s attempt to suicide requires a detailed and careful examination from the side of the readers. At the surface level, the root cause could be attributed to his mother’s death and his absence on that day, by choosing to live with his father. But, Chick received a letter from his daughter with pictures of her wedding on that fateful day he decided to ride out. He was not informed of the wedding day, nor was he invited. He was not invited mainly because, with his acute addiction to alcohol, he had become a great risk at a family function. It was something unbearable for Dick. He suddenly realized the futility of his life. Therefore, he wanted to end his life. “WHAT FINISHED ME, what pushed me over the edge, strange as it sounds, was my daughter’s wedding”, says Dick in For One More Day (p. 6). His father did not take care of his family. Now, he finds that he too has repeated his father’s irresponsible action. In fact, the degree of his love towards his mother seemed to be equal to the degree of his disgust towards his father. He can, therefore, easily measure the depth of the disgust his own family must be having against him. It is a kind of déjà vu. We fail to learn from the experience of our forefathers. Who knows, Dick’s children also, he might have realized, may repeat it again in their life. Dick’s helplessness and the precarious situations into which man pushes himself are skillfully depicted by the writer in his novel. As he goes on narrating his story, Dick poses several questions to the readers. Repeatedly he confesses that his story is a ghost story. Is it not true that every family has a ghost story to tell? Is not a fact that everyone, one way or other, yearns for one more day in his life to settle some score. It may be to make compromises with those one dearly loved, or to make conversations with them and seek some form of redemption. Words like “divorce”, “Mom”, and “died” resonate in the novel, knocking at the subconscious level of the readers. As the story moves from the personal to the general, the novelist successfully unravels the cruelty children normally inflict on their parents. Also the stress throughout in the story seems to be on the delay in arriving at the proper realization in life. Though Dick wrecks his own life, he does a great service to the society. He reminds the readers that there is only one life, and if we mess it up, nobody can help us. Life is like a mountain. Not only is the act of climbing it, but coming down is also equally difficult. The readers listen to Chick with the enthusiasm of a sports reporter, as he narrates the story. As the readers wander through his “mythical and magical” world, they wonder how profoundly true his experience is. The story of his innocent and mature days provides a great literary reading. He is able to carry the sympathy of his readers with him. But, at the same time, the outward journey of Dick gives a matching inward journey to the readers. The story, at the same time, touches the sense of incompleteness which pervades the life of everyone. “One More Day will make you smile. It will make you wistful. It will make you blink back tears of nostalgia. But most of all, it will make you believe in the eternal power of a mothers love", says James McBride, the author of the Color of Water. It is a wonderful novel. The writer, before he started writing, seems to have done a good ground work about life and the emotions which follow a man down up to his grave. The novel reveals the tension within a man, who is called upon to play different successful roles. And it also reveals the consequences, if one is not cunning enough to change oneself whenever social pressures increase. Dick’s regret is that he failed in his role as a son, but more miserably as a father. He, in short, failed to learn the art of living. Reference McBride, “What People Are Saying”, Editorial Reviews. http://www.foronemoreday.com/reviews.htm Read More