A Thematic Analysis Of The Short Story 'Fathers' By Alice Munro

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Fathers is a short story by Alice Munro that was set in the 1940s during World War II. It is told from the perspective of a narrator in rural America who reflects back on girls she knew and was friends with during her youth, and gives her recollections on their fathers. It is an interesting look at the father-child dynamic during the World War II years, and illustrates how that dynamic has changed in the years since.
This was a period in time in which life was difficult and often short, as we found out right at the onset of the story when the first thing we read about is the death of Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a farmer who died of electrocution and the first of the fathers we are introduced to. The death notice indicated that the funeral had already passed by the time the paper went to print, indicating that deaths of this sort were not uncommon and, due to the pressing matter of contributing to the war effort, not something that warranted much time to grieve. Harvey beat his wife and kids when provoked, and while not regarded as saintly in any way, is presented as being fairly typical of what fathers were like in those days.
Newcombe's daughter, Dahlia, had a bad enough relationship with him that the implication early on with the line, “‘Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father’s accident” is that the possibility existed that she killed him. Another line alluding to this possibility came when she watched her father coming out of the stable with a pitchfork and thought to herself (and confided in the narrator) that she should kill him now while she's still young enough to avoid being hung as punishment.

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