Pre-writing
Similarities:
1. Both boys lack of father’s role in their life.
– My Oedipus Complex: working in army, rarely being home → Santa Claus
– A Shocking Accident: traveling writer → Government’s spy
→ Do not understand deeply about fathers.
2. Father relating problems to their life
– My Oedipus Complex: Competing for Mother’s attention
– A Shocking Accident: How to tell about his father’s accident without making
people laugh.
3. Appearance of new character:
– My Oedipus Complex: His little brother
– A Shocking Accident: His lover
Differences
My Oedipus Complex
A Shocking Accident
Main characters
– I always woke with the first
light and, with all the
responsibilities of the previous
day melted, feeling myself
rather like the sun, ready to
illuminate and rejoice
– Nor was Jerome a boy who
cried; he was a boy who
brooded
Responds to
father’s events
– Father go back home:
Monster, enemies, open and
avowed
– Father passed away: His
love for the dead man only
increased.
Timeline
– About more than 9 months to a
year (short term)
– Jerome become a man
(long term)
Results
– Become more closer
relationship.
– Feel comfortable about his
father dead.
Enjoyable:
– My Oedipus Complex: Although Larry said that he and his father are enemies,
he continuously repeats his father daily action, which shows that inside, he loves
his father.
– A Shocking Accident: Jerome is too worry about how other people react to the
dead of his father but this do not make him angry about the accident and “his
love to the dead man only increased”.
Lesson: Father (parents) plays important role to the growth progress of child. However,
in this progress, there will be other people appear in child’s life and impact differently.
The absence of parental care in early childhood negatively affect children’s
development in daily behaviors and their attitude toward things (Zhou et al, 2018). This
is what happened to the two boys: Larry in My Oedipus Complex by Frank O’ Connor
(1963) and Jerome in A Shocking Accident by Graham Greene (1982). In both stories,
they have shared some common conditions as well as contained some differences, which
will be descried deeply in the below.
At the begin, there are several common conditions between Larry and Jerome.
As Larry’s father “was in the army all through the war” (O’Connor, 1986) and what is
kept in Larry’s remember is only the way that his father used to entrance and exit their
house. The interaction between them was done under candelight sometimes, when his
father peered at him and when Larry played with his father souvenir (O’Connor, 1986).
At this stage in Larry’s life, his father was no more familiar to him than Santa Claus. On
the other hands, Jerome’s father was also not familiar to him. Jerome imagined his father
“from a restless widowed author into a mysterious adventurer who travelled in far
places” even as a secret agent “might have been wounded in a hail of machine-gun
