Analysis of Two Short Stories - Essay Example

Part I In Amy Tan’s short story, Two Kinds, The character, Jing-mei depicts the emotional turmoil one experiences when constantly expected to liveup to her mother’s dreams. Her frustration of having to endure the impractical expectations of her mother transformed into her cruel outburst “I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t my mother.” and finally “I wish I’d never been born! . . . I wish I were dead!”. As a reader, I find this outburst of Jing-mei most powerful and interesting considering the fact that till this moment she has always tenaciously strived to meet the expectations of her mother. The Chinese-American mother has always imposed her own dreams and ambitions on her daughter Jing-Mei. Jing-Mei’s constant failures disappointed her mother. Clearly, the story depicts a mother who forces her daughter to become a pianist against her wishes. This relationship exposes the vagaries in the relationship between children and their immigrant parents. Being born and brought up in different cultural backgrounds, often children refuse to follow the dreams of their parents and shape their lives according to the desires of their parents. The incessant pressure of her mother made Jing-Mei distance herself from her mother thus shredding the deep bond that a mother shares with her daughter. 2. Through various interactions, the author has depicted conflicts that exist in any relationship and leaves the readers to interpret the reasons behind such conflicts. Often the mother’s opinions may appear to be ironic like her strong belief that her daughter is a prodigy which is actually not true. In another instance, the mother criticizes a girl TV character whom Jing-Mei defends by stating “Maybe she’s not the best, but she’s trying hard” to which her mother responds “Just like you,”..... “Not the best. Because you not trying”. Clearly, the mother neglects Jing-Mei’s lifelong struggles as according to her she is not trying enough. Thus, the author depicts a conflicting relationship arising out of lack of understanding. I feel the author, Amy Tan has expressed herself as an extremely strong writer when exploring the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. Tan has successfully exposed the intricacies of the mother’s character and her apparent domineering nature in the final part of the story. After few months passed since her mother’s death, Jing-Mei opens one music book that contained two halves of the same song. Jing-Mei symbolized the “pleading child” who forever suffered from identity crisis in her attempt to prove her worth to her mother, and realized that such a child can never be “perfectly contented”. I feel this as very interesting since Jing-Mei refused to believe herself as a competent piano player which her mother has always tried to impose upon her. However, it is music that eventually made her realize the value of mother’s love. 3. I find two short stories Gimpel the Fool and The Company of Wolves similar in the sense that both these stories depict the apparent foolish and vulnerable nature of the protagonists. The character Gimpel has always been the target of ridicule from others including his wife. After her death, he discovers that truth is only a relative term and everything will happen when it has to happen; “Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn’t happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year” (Singer). The story is replete with symbolisms. For the conventional people, Gimpel is a fool to accept all lies of his wife. However, towards the end of the story the same character when he reaches old age compels us to ask when it is he or others who call him fool are the real fools. In the second part of The Company of Wolves, a young girl was confronted by a werewolf. In spite of her upbringing in a protected family and being taught to beware of evils of the world, she accepts the challenge of a stranger to race to her grandmother’s house. When she arrives at the house, she realizes the true identity of the hunter who is actually a werewolf. The girl’s character that was portrayed as too naïve was the basis of the events that occurred towards the end. Believing that no evil can harm her, she sacrificed herself to the werewolf. Gimpel is a character who is considered as a fool by others but his foolishness is actually manifestation of profound wisdom. It is his wisdom that made him stay loyal to his wife who has never been honest with him. In the other story, the young girl clearly understood that she was deceived by the werewolf. However her innocence made her believe that she will not be harmed, and this belief made her succumb to his kiss. Part II 4. Grace Paley’s short story, A Conversation with My Father is about a relationship between a middle-aged woman and her eighty-six year old bedridden father. It is based on a conversation between the characters that portray opposing views of two people belonging to two different generations. Their conversation is centered on fiction and how they perceive tragedy in fiction and real life. On the request of her father, the daughter invents a short story about a drug-addicted son and his mother. In order to sustain a close bond with the son his mother too takes up drugs. Eventually, the son succeeds in liberating himself from the addiction and leaves his mother. The conflict between the father and daughter lies in the fact that they view tragedy in fiction from different perspectives. Although the father is old and ailing, he is fully conscious and meticulous about “details, craft, technique”. On the contrary, the daughter believes in constant changes in life and hence rejects her father’s notion of clinging to the familiar. The different views of the characters is reflected in the father’s rejection of his daughter’s story and telling her to emulate the style of writing as can be seen in the works of Russian writers Turgenev and Chekhov whose stories often had a tragic ending. Eager to satisfy her father, she composes a second story with a similar theme as the first one but with more elaborate description of the characters and their backgrounds. However, she still fails to impress her father who concludes that she has “a nice sense of humor”, “cant tell a plain story”, and hence should not waste time on writing fiction. In both the stories, she keeps them open-ended as if to provide opportunity for the mother to amend her way of life and revert to a normal life. As in any open-ended stories, readers can form individual opinions. As such the eighty six year old father accepted the story as a tragedy with the woman committed to a lifelong suffering. However, the daughter claimed that the woman is “only about forty (and) she could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on”. The father refused to believe that such optimistic turn of events can happen in real life. With the son gone, the father believes that the woman will have no reason to come out of her grief and change her way of living. When the daughter refused to accept his view that only a tragic ending can make a fiction worth reading, and insisted that the woman today has a respectable job the father becomes upset and agitated; “How long will it be?” he asked. “Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?”. The conflict between the father and his daughter does not get resolved since even after constant pestering by the father to alter the ending, the daughter refuses to do so. It can be seen that the relationship between the ailing and aged father and his daughter is amicable in spite of having opposing views. This has been established when the daughter remembers that she had “promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing”. This may be more because her father is very old and has heart ailment, therefore any kind of lingering argument can be fatal for him than the fact that she surrenders to his views. However, in the current conversation she refuses to admit defeat since she strongly believes that positive changes are always possible in life especially if the character in question still has a long life ahead like the woman in her story is only forty years old. On the other hand, her father believes that tragedy in life can render a person helpless with no hope and he rebukes his daughter, “As a writer that’s your main trouble. You don’t want to recognize it. Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end.”. The different views that they hold in the context of opportunities in life are born from their different experiences in life which is natural because of their age difference. It is apparent that she became a writer to please her father since the latter was an artist for two decades. However, although the father loves her he disapproves of her writing style and views on life. Throughout the story it is clear that although they have a loving relation, their views are conflicting with each refusing to understand the other’s views. The daughter believes that fiction should reflect opportunities in life that were denied to previous generations. In comparison, the father prefers the works of those writers who talked about strict societies with characters subjected to daily woes and limited opportunities. References Two Kinds by Amy Tan Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter A Conversation with My Father by Grace Paley Read More