Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant Analysis

Communion-

The middle child in the Tull family, Ezra, loves to cook. He owns a restaurant called the Homesick Restaurant, and he longs for his family to have a meal together in the restaurant. However, every time he tries, there is some kind of argument before the meal ends, and the family is unable t0 finish. Usually, the person to walk out is the mother, Pearl. Tyler writes, "And she (Pearl) turned and marched back across the dining room, erect as a little wind-up doll" (Tyler 139). By comparing Pearl to a wind-up doll, Tyler illustrates how all it takes to get Pearl worked up is for someone to push the right button, or turn the right knob, and how once she gets going, there is no stopping her.

At the end of the book, Pearl passes away.

Pearl, the thing that tore them apart so many times before, is now uniting them in her absence. The whole reason why the family gathered was to attend her funeral, thus they were brought together by her.

Plot Summary- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is the story of a broken family. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character- the mother, Pearl, the sons, Cody and Ezra, and the daughter, Jenny. This helps to illustrate the struggles that the family experiences, because each of the narrators have very different personalities and viewpoints of the story. While some characters are reliable narrators, others are

Their father, Beck, left the family when the children were young, the oldest one being about thirteen. Pearl was a major perfectionist, as well as an abusive mother. Of course, this had an effect on her children. Her middle son, Ezra, was the favorite child of the family. He was always trying to pull the family together. One of his tactics was through a dinner- he loved to cook, so he always tried to make a nice dinner for his family, that way they could enjoy one meal together. However, the family never made it through a single meal. Cody, the oldest son, was extremely jealous of Ezra. Every single thing that went wrong in his life, he blamed on Ezra, even though most things had nothing to do with Ezra. This jealously continued well into his adult life, to the point where he believed that even his wife preferred Ezra over himself. Jenny, the only daughter, remained afraid of her mother well into adulthood. She found herself following in her mother's footsteps, by mistreating her