LONGING FOR A FATHER: STORIES (p. 374)
JOHN CHEEVER
Reunion (p. 374)
Relationships between children and their parents following a divorce are often notori-
ously complex. John Cheever’s short story “Reunion,” originally published in The New
Yorker in 1962, condenses a rich narrative about the relationship between a son and his
father within a masterly short form. In this piece, a mostly grown-up Charlie is seeing his
father for the first (and last) time after his parents’ divorce three years prior. Although it is
not clear what their relationship was like before his parents’ separation, Charlie expresses
that he is “terribly happy to see [his father]” and wishes for some kind of photographic
record of their encounter. Such a desire indicates that this is both a rare meeting and
which suggests that he has been drinking heavily. Readers might speculate that the
father is not only an alcoholic but also a particularly unkind drunk (which might
have contributed to his failed marriage and strained relationship with his son). The
story concludes where it began, in Grand Central Station, and with the father’s
attempt to “get a rise out of” the man selling newspapers. It’s apparent that
DAGOBERTO GILB
Uncle Rock (p. 377)
In the short story “Uncle Rock,” Dagoberto Gilb chronicles a young Mexican Ameri-
can boy’s experience watching his beautiful mother meet, work for, and date a series
of men who move fleetingly in and out of his and his mother’s lives. Throughout the
story, Erick refuses to speak to anyone but his friend Albert and, in the form of an in-
ner monologue, the reader. By withholding speech from his mother and the men who
such a claim as a young boy’s rejection of someone who might one day reject him; but
just as significantly, it is a rejection of someone whose family life he envies. In
choosing to speak to Albert and in taking the risk of lying to him about his father,
Erick reveals his strong desire to be like Albert and to make his family “whole.” In
ending the friendship, Erick seems to be giving up hope of the kind of family structure
Erick learns to value different qualities and comes to a richer understanding of what it
means to be a good man.
A TROUBLED FREEDOM:
CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR A STORY (p. 399)
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Soldier’s Home (p. 399)
Ernest Hemingway, himself a veteran, published the short story “Soldier’s Home” in
1925. The story chronicles a young soldier’s difficulty in reentering civilian life after
several years serving in France and Germany during World War I. Unlike other sol-
diers, who returned home to excitement and fanfare, Krebs’s return goes largely un-
remarked because he’s sent back home so late. Being among the last divisions to
return from the Rhine in 1919, Krebs is coming home to a town that’s already heard
its fill of war stories and celebrated too many homecomings.
While at first he doesn’t want to discuss the war, Krebs soon changes his mind,
discovering only too late that no one wants to listen. He starts lying about his
experiences to get people’s attention, but even those stories go unheard. He is
understandably upset with himself for the lies and tries to live as simply as possible,
Hemingway’s frequent use of the word complicated suggests that Krebs is
ultimately working to center himself and regain control over his life. He seems unable
to fully process his experience, struggling to understand the battles he participated in.
Toward the end of the story, he finds great fulfillment in reading historical accounts of
those conflicts—the books perhaps help him to locate himself a little better. Krebs
ultimately decides to leave home, in part because he doesn’t feel he belongs there. His
family keeps hoping that he will fit back into the mold he left behind, and they don’t
seem to understand the ways in which he might have changed. At the same time, he is
tired of telling lies, of pretending to have feelings, and decides he might be better off
living at a distance. Although his treatment of his mother, the lies he tells upon his
return, and his tendency to let others take care of him, all make him a slightly less
likeable figure, his decision to leave his hometown suggests also that he does care
about his family and his own mental health. Although he may say he doesn’t love his
mother, for example, in leaving he is potentially sparing her the heartache of watching
him struggle to find himself again.
CULTURAL CONTEXTS
JAMES M. HUTCHISSON, From Ernest Hemingway: A New Life (p. 405)
LEICESTER HEMINGWAY, From My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (p. 410)
CAROLINE ALEXANDER, The Shock of War (p. 414)
TROUBLED FREEDOM
JAMES M. HUTCHISSON, From Ernest Hemingway: A New Life
James Hutchisson’s selection from Ernest Hemingway: A New Life offers important
insights into how Hemingway’s battle trauma influenced his life and career. While we
should be careful of drawing too many parallels between Hemingway and his literary
characters, there is little doubt that Hemingway’s personal experiences in World War
I, including his resulting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), affected his way of
Boastfulness and guilt, for example, are crucial to Hutchisson’s discussion of
Hemingway’s life and the author’s own depiction of Harold Krebs in “Soldier’s
Home.” In one sense, we might say that boastfulness—even telling lies—is a way of
maintaining distance from real events, of keeping things going smoothly in the way
Krebs seemed to favor. At the same time, boasting of acts of heroism also draws atten-
tion to the speaker in ways that might cause discomfort or guilt. Surely such boasts
helped shape Hemingway’s career. Yet Hemingway, as Hutchisson notes, “continued
to doubt the extent of his heroism” and confided in a former commander that “all the
real heroes are dead.” His character Krebs’s guilt seemed centered more on his rela-
tionship with his family and his inability to give his mother, in particular, the love she
needed. While it is not clear how Hemingway personally experienced his relationship
to his family members, Hutchisson’s descriptions suggest that his post-traumatic stress
disorder manifested in unaffectionate behavior, among other things, and connecting
to others has proven to be especially difficult for some returning soldiers.
LEICESTER HEMINGWAY, From My Brother, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester, offers another important perspective
on Hemingway’s wartime experiences and his literary career, in this selection from My
Brother, Ernest Hemingway. More focused on Hemingway’s return to Oak Park than
his later life, the excerpt moves between public and private spaces in the young war
hero’s life—from school assembly halls to an upstairs bedroom (with the light always
on at night)—offering insight into the hometown hero’s experiences after the war.
While Hemingway himself received a far grander homecoming than Krebs, his
character in “Soldier’s Home,” there are a number of interesting similarities between
the two. Both embellished their wartime experiences for listeners’ entertainment and
both labored under the growing expectation of their parents that they’d settle on some
“’sensible’ way of life.” Neither adapted particularly well to their old homes. While
CAROLINE ALEXANDER, The Shock of War
A highly readable explanation of the shell shock “question”—is shell shock a physical
wound or a psychological one?—Caroline Alexander’s “The Shock of War” helpfully
underscores some of the factors that likely influenced Hemingway’s work and the be-
haviors of his literary creations, like Krebs, in “Soldier’s Home.” Shell shock, or what
we have now termed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), was first documented by
medical personnel during World War I. While first presumed to result from soldiers’
proximity to exploding shells, Alexander explains, medics soon noticed that many sol-
diers experiencing signs of shell shock (loss of memory, headaches, dizziness, sleep
disorders, etc.) hadn’t been anywhere near an exploding shell.
The number of afflicted soldiers was significant, and most professionals were un-
sure how best to treat them. Alexander notes that some chalked the disorder up to a
lack of nerves (or, by extension, bravery), and some of the controversy around what
shell shock was and how one should cope with it stemmed implicitly from that era’s
FOOD IN FAMILIES: ESSAYS (p. 421)
RUTH REICHL
The Queen of Mold (p. 421)
“The Queen of Mold” by noted food critic and memoirist Ruth Reichl is a thoughtful,
almost charming, reflection on her mother’s cooking habits. Her mother, the “Queen
of Mold,” is so-named because she held unmistakable dominion over food in all forms
of ripeness. Touted from the start as a “true story” (614), the essay describes how
Reichl’s mother would cook and serve complex meals sometimes made up of spoiled
or moldy food. Blissfully ignorant of how anyone without her “iron stomach” (615)
might handle these dishes, her mother’s experiments in the kitchen taught Reichl
some of the ways in which food can help us understand people. And these relation-
ships can evolve, as illustrated by the author’s explanation of how her father describes
a particularly revolting mouthful: “The first time he said it tasted like cat toes and rot-
ted barley, but over the years the description got better.” He later, and almost fondly,
DAVID SEDARIS
Tasteless (p. 424)
David Sedaris, a well-known humorist, flips typical expectations for a food-related
essay and explains in “Tasteless” that he is, for all intents and purposes, an
unimaginative eater and cook. He describes himself not as a connoisseur or what we
might call a “foodie,” but rather as a “shoveller.” He charts his early relationship to
food mostly in terms of quantity; growing up in a large family, he always worried he
wouldn’t get enough to eat. While he doesn’t divulge whether this was a legitimate
fear, such an explanation does offer a useful narrative frame for positioning him as
uninterested in quality. For example, he describes at one point offering to buy his
sister’s food off her plate for a nickel. His inability to even name the tidbit in question
(ribs or chicken?) points to his general inclination in favor of simply more food, a
desire that seems almost built into his identity. At the end of the essay, he groups the
GEETA KOTHARI
If You Are What You Eat, then What Am I?
Geeta Kothari’s “If You Are What You Eat, then What Am I?” is an essay of anecdotes
and reflections. Organized in a series of short sections or vignettes, the essay greets
readers with a veritable buffet of reminiscences and thick descriptions that chronicle
the author’s relationship with her family through food. Readers learn not just about
specific foods—American, Indian, and even Italian—but about the relationship be-
tween food and identity. For Kothari, food is a vehicle for conveying belonging and
knowledge; one’s tastes communicate something about the person, which means that
eating (and wanting to eat) the right things matters. Interestingly, Kothari explains, her
mother never “[used] food as a weapon.” That is to say, she never forced her children
to eat traditional Indian foods, but rather cooked what she knew how to cook and ac-
commodated some degree of variation—Kothari’s sister’s appreciation for pasta and
preferences is of course the knowledge and expertise to cook the dishes that matter.
Her mother did not explicitly teach her to make the dishes of her childhood, as if the
knowledge might somehow be ingrained—part of her Indian identity—and Kothari
observes that she treats her own husband similarly, expecting him to simply
understand how particular foods work and what they mean.
CRITICAL DECISIONS ABOUT PARENTHOOD:
ACROSS GENRES (p. 436)
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
No Name Woman (p. 436)
In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among
Ghosts jumped straight off the presses into the multicultural literary canon in universi-
ty classrooms. The book is interesting for many reasons. Its style is filled with metaphor
and concrete imagery, often reading like poetry. Characters are as three-dimensional
and dynamic as those of any short story, and they evoke a specific situation in a way
In her adaptation of the stories of her childhood, Kingston critiques both
American and Chinese cultural limitations, especially the racist assumptions of white
America and the patriarchal structures of China that reduce women to shameful
beings who are less than human. To be a girl is to be worthless and bad. Girls grew up
to move into other families, so every mouthful of food given to a girl was stolen from
the parents’ true children, the boys. In China, where infanticide has long been
accepted, female children were often disposed of, especially in times of starvation. So
when the young Maxine Hong begins to menstruate, her mother tells her the story of
her aunt, the No Name Woman of this narrative, an excerpt from The Woman
Warrior. The assumption is that the warning is needed so that the young woman will
not commit the sexual transgressions that will embarrass the family. But the author
comes to see that the true punishment dealt to her aunt has been her erasure. Her fate
has been a sort of “reverse ancestor worship” in which she continues to pay for her sin
against the family. She has no name, and all memory of her has been wiped out,
except as a bad example.
Kingston imagines scenarios that explain her aunt’s shameful pregnancy,
imagining at first that she was forced, then briefly that she had been promiscuous, and
finally that she had sought out a lover, deliberately attracting and winning his love. She
even realizes the possibility of incest. Kingston’s aunt is one of the ghosts who haunt her
girlhood and continues to haunt the woman twenty years later. Her affinity for this
particular spirit is not altogether safe and wholesome, she admits at the end of her
narrative. By filling in the gaps of her mother’s cautionary tale to find the personality
behind it, Kingston imagines her aunt’s motives and explores her own assumptions
about gender and society. The reader is invited to do the same because Kingston
acknowledges the open quality of this mystery story.
class may have ended unplanned pregnancies with abortions, either by their own
choice or because of their parents’ insistence. Sometimes they mention this privately
to the instructor, but usually they keep silent. We might want to keep this in mind as
the class enters into the discussion of sensitive matters, maintaining a noncondemning
atmosphere. Young men might be asked to consider what they would do if they
realized they had impregnated someone. Can they imagine covering this act up by
joining the villagers who invade the woman’s household? Although discussing their
punishments for minor infractions may seem trivial in the light of what happens to No
Name Woman, this is an illuminating way to discover the values of our families and to
think about the warrants we bring into adulthood. Students also might want to share
the stories their parents tell, usually to laughter, about their childhood or adolescent
infractions. Have fathers shared with sons their college drinking escapades? Or an
arrest at a political demonstration?
Sometimes, Kingston tells her readers explicitly that “No Name Woman” is a tale
of gender inequality. For example, she tells us in paragraph 15, “To be a woman, to
have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough.” But the whole story is
implicitly about the greater burden that sex places on a woman. She is punished by
the family and the village, must bear the child and give birth alone, and is driven
finally to commit murder/suicide because she cannot provide a respectable life for the
baby. We can believe the part of the story told by Kingston’s mother, though she leaves
many gaps. We can also trust the information the author provides about herself and
her own childhood experiences. Her facts about Chinese customs can be verified. But
she only guesses about her aunt’s experiences and motives, often signaling this with
the word perhaps. When she speaks of her aunt haunting her, she speaks
metaphorically, but in an emotional and psychological sense this may be equally as
true as the numerical fact that there are only one hundred surnames in all of China.
As we have seen in many of the texts of this anthology, writers often distinguish
between things that are true in a human or spiritual sense and things that are merely
factual. Kingston’s imagined events give flesh to the sparse facts of her mother’s
cautionary tale and her knowledge of her Chinese family and history. Kingston
reiterates the assertion that the crime of No Name Woman was severe because it
happened in the context of famine. “Adultery is extravagance,” Kingston says of the
Chinese view. Thirty or forty years ago in America, a daughter’s pregnancy would have
brought shame to her family in most regions and subcultures. Girls were sent away to
“homes for unwed mothers,” and their babies disappeared into the adoption market.
Neighbors often guessed the reason for the young woman’s absence, but secrecy
reigned. Sometimes, family members found ways to quietly claim the child as their
own, and there are tales of people discovering in adulthood that the woman they
thought was an older sister or aunt was their biological mother. Those with cooperative
For American readers, “No Name Woman” in its entirety describes an egregious
invasion of privacy. We do not see sexual transgression among consenting adults as a
reason for punishment to be dealt out by the community, and we usually consider
what happens behind closed doors to be a matter of concern only to the parties
involved. Yet the villagers feel compelled to tramp through the bedrooms of the
offender’s house. Certainly we would not punish the whole family for the sins of one
member, we think. We might recall, however, that “No Name Woman” lives in
China in the 1920s. In the United States at that time, many laws regulating sexual
behavior were on the books, and women pregnant outside of marriage were ostracized
in most communities. Cultural and historical contexts shape definitions of private and
public and definitions of crimes against the community, but trials by their very nature
cause public and private spheres to overlap.
There are useful connections to be made in comparing the social trial and
accompanying punishment faced by “No Name Woman” with the legal case brought
against China Berkowitz and Jeremy in Boyle’s “The Love of My Life.” The women in
both stories hid their pregnancies to postpone repercussions within their families and
communities, well aware that having a child is not considered acceptable for women
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Good People (p. 446)
David Foster Wallace’s “Good People” brings issues of family, love, and faith to the
forefront in its treatment of a couple’s decision to abort (or not) their fetus. In leaving
the term “abortion” out of the story and repeating the terms “good” and “good peo-
ple,” Wallace asks his readers to acknowledge the religious tension around the abor-
tion issue and its stakes. “Good” typically refers to “rightness,” and being the “right sort
of person” means that one makes decisions that are morally right, especially from a
religious point of view. Closely tied to “good” is the issue of “love” and what it means
to love and be loved. Love is actually quite central to the abortion decision in this
case, (rather than economic factors, for example), the main character Lane concludes
with the realization that he might not actually know what love is.
The story is shaped by the movement of the sun and the resulting shadows, for the
couple in question remains sitting on the park bench throughout the narrative. The
he believes Jesus sees them, “blind and groping” and “wanting to please God.” At the
same time, he is also granted a vision “into Sheri’s heart.” He predicts that she will
turn to him, tell him that she wants to keep the baby, and absolve him of all parenting
responsibility. He further sees, in his moment of grace, that it would be just as impos-
sible for her to raise the child alone as it would be for her to have an abortion, so her
actual desire is that he will marry her. Lane’s clarity, however, remains in his head, for
readers are never offered insight into Sheri’s thoughts or desires; she is as unreadable
to us as she is for Lane before his moment of grace. It’s not clear what Wallace means
by her silence. Is it that she isn’t an equal participant? Is she the stereotypically myste-
rious female? Is it that Lane is learning to understand her in more nuanced ways? Or
is this a kind of violation, with her as the passive recipient of our and Lane’s reading?