Complex Relationships In 'A Story' By Li-Young Lee

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The layers and complications of a relationship can be told through many types of literary devices. In the poem “A Story” by Li-Young Lee, the poet conveys a complex relationship between father and son using point of view and also structure. While the point of view is a third person, the narrator is speaking the father’s thoughts. There is a story in his thoughts that when analyzed show the conflict between the father and the son. The last two lines of the last stanza explain that conflict through the narrator’s eyes which in this case could also be the reader’s eyes since the reader would have come to the same conclusion or reasoning. The last two lines of the poem state that “the boy’s supplications and the father’s love add up to silence”

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