A family’s dynamics is the core or base on which one defines ideas about family. Numerous things impact family dynamics, for instance: birth order, spiritually, change, personalities, race, and sexual orientation. When one is determining a family’s dynamic they must look at the big picture to fully grasp what makes a family the way they are. One cannot truly understand the family dynamics of someone until they put themselves in their shoes. “That Evening Sun Go Down”, “Soldier’s Home”, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” contain family dynamics that help to shape and mold each story. These pieces of literature depict family dynamics, but are found on their own unique foundation. “That Evening Sun Go Down” is found on the dynamics of racism …show more content…
and selfishness. “Soldier’s Home” depicts the struggle for one to move on from the tragedy of fighting in war and how that affects one’s family. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” deals with the tragic death of an entire family due to the grandmother's selfish desires. One’s past experiences can greatly impact their family dynamic. While looking at a piece of Literature, one can find the family dynamic by deciphering each character’s experiences, behavior, actions, and the way in which they speak to one another. “That Evening Sun Go Down”, by William Faulkner, contains the family dynamic of Nancy and Jesus. Nancy and Jesus are a black married couple. Nancy works for the Compson family and is pregnant with another man’s baby, causing friction between her and Jesus, her husband. Fearing her husband Jesus, Nancy does not want to go home alone, so she brings the Compson children home with her. Nancy fears that Jesus is going to kill her. Nancy has some obvious issues in trusting Jesus, as she feels threatened by him. Race plays a significant role in the family dynamic of the Compson family in the short story, “That Evening Sun Go Down”. The Compson children do not respect Nancy and see her as the person who does their laundry and not for who she truly is. For example, when the Compson family leaves Nancy alone at her house, Quentin asks his father, ”Who will do our washing now, father?” (Faulkner 267). They do not seem to care that her life is in danger, but instead are concerned with who will take over doing their laundry. The Compson children do not value life, they do not mentally see Nancy as a human being. Sadly, Jason, who is the youngest Compson child, said "I ain't a nigger…” several times throughout the story (Faulkner 261). Jason’s speech went uncorrected by his parents, which only amplifies the racist attitude toward black people. Racism appears acceptable to the Compson family because it was the cultural norm at that time. The foundation or family dynamic of “That Evening Sun Go Down” is found on racism and selfishness. Regarding Jason’s words, Ellen Bonds states, “They shock me, repulse me, sadden me, in part because a child who does not fully comprehend what he is saying speaks them.” (Bonds 59). Bonds discusses in her Studies in Short Fiction, the idea of viewing blacks as “the other” (Bonds 61). There are “the whites” and then there are “the others” (Bonds 61). They dehumanize the black population. Nancy unintentionally causes friction between Mr. and Mrs. Compson. Because she is afraid to step foot in her house not knowing if the angry Jesus will be there, Mr. Compson walks her home. Of all characters in this literary piece, Mr. Compson seems to show a bit of kindness by bringing the fearful Nancy home. This gesture fueled resentment in Mrs. Compson because it left her feeling unprotected and jealous. Mrs. Compson selfishly wanted all of his attention and did not support his sensitivity toward Nancy and her fearful situation. Mrs. Compson states, "How much longer is this going to go on? I to be left alone in this big house while you take home a frightened Negro?” (Faulkner 260). This quote provides incite into how selfish, inconsiderate and ignorant this white family truly is. In order to truly understand someone’s family dynamics, one must put themselves in the other person’s shoes. The Compson family did not put themselves in Nancy’s shoes causing their selfish, inconsiderate and ignorant behavior toward Nancy. “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway, depicts how the main character Krebs affects his family’s dynamic after returning from war.
After returning from war, Krebs’s family wants him to be his old prior war self. Krebs’s parents try to entice him to go out on dates by giving him the privilege of using the family car, but he is uninterested. Krebs’s family assumes that he can go back to living his old life without any side effects from fighting in combat. His Parents do not bring up war or ask him how he is really feeling after returning. Krebs tries to isolate himself from his family and the outside world because he feels un-relatable. Interestingly, Steven Trout says, “In Krebs's household, more a soldier's hell than home, this denial assumes the form of his parents' condescension.” (Trout 12). This quote symbolizes that Krebs is struggling to relate and desiring to be understood. His parents think they know what is best for their son, but yet they never ask him what he thinks and how he feels. They lack compassion and understanding toward Krebs. They act as if Krebs never went to war and think that he should have no problem forgetting the war and moving on with his life. When Krebs is reading the paper he goes directly to the sports section due to having feelings “…of being cut off from a culture that in its rush to resume “normalcy” treats his wartime experiences as if they never happened” (Trout 12). Krebs feels out of place being back
home. The most significant relationship within the story has to be Krebs and his mother. In “Soldier’s Home”, Krebs’s mother states, “Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?” (Hemingway 4). He explains to his mother that he cannot love anyone, which causes her to cry and become emotional. One’s past experiences can greatly impact their family dynamic and the love they share with one another. It seems that Krebs and his mother had a great relationship prior to the war, because she seems so heartbroken over the fact that her son feels that he cannot love and also cannot pray. Desperately, Krebs mother wants her old son back and struggles to wait for him to move on. This helps one to better understand why Krebs family is pushing him to get out and do the things he enjoyed previously. Coming back from war is a difficult task; it takes time for a soldier to recover from the trauma faced in battle. Steven Trout says this in reference to "Soldier's Home", this short story “…demonstrates that a nation without a clear and honest picture of what its soldiers have endured will be incapable of understanding them when they return, and, therefore, will be incapable of insuring their successful reentry into civilian life.” (Trout 13). If Krebs family put themselves in his shoes instead of ignoring his difficult past they would better understand how to relate to him and would probably be more considerate of his feelings. It seems that Krebs is paralyzed from experiencing the tragedies of war, making it extremely difficult for him to move forward in his life. Understandingly, Krebs struggles with connecting with his family, due to experiencing the terrors of war and not knowing how to move on from it. In a “Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, the family dynamic is focused on the grandmother. The grandmother causes the whole family to die including herself because of her selfish ways. While traveling to Florida, she wanted to stop and visit an old house she remembered from her childhood, not realizing that it was in a completely different state. This did not occur to her until after it was too late. Because of the grandmother’s selfish desires, she eventually puts her family in harms way, causing the death of her family and her own life. Katherine Keil says that the grandmother’s "…insistence on having her own way and sneaking Pitty Sing, her cat, into the car, despite her knowledge that Bailey would not allow this, directly causes the accident.” (Keil 45). The grandmother was deceitful in bringing her cat along even though she knows her family would not approve of her actions. She was obsessed with her appearance and making sure that everyone knew that she was a lady. Her family views her as an annoyance, because she is a busy body and never wants to miss out on anything. Her granddaughter states, ’"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.”’ (O’Connor 1). As depicted from the quote, it seems that the grandmother is seen as a burden on her family’s shoulders. After the family’s car crashes the grandmother extends grace to the Misfit and refers to him as her baby. In Conclusion, these three pieces of literature depict the many similarities and differences among family dynamics. All these families have stories to tell. Tragedies occurred in each of these stories. Nancy is left alone to die in “That Evening Sun Go Down”; as the Compson family leaves her alone at her home knowing that she feels threatened by her husband. Krebs struggles to relate and build better relationships within his family after returning from war in “Soldier’s Home”. The family dynamic in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” tragically ends due to the whole family being killed by the Misfit, because of the grandmother’s selfishness. Each piece of Literature includes it’s own unique obstacles which dramatically impacts each family’s dynamics. The reader must look closely into each specific character and their experiences, behavior, actions, and the way in which they speak to one another in order to truly understand specific family dynamics.
In “Soldier’s Home,” the main character Krebs exhibits grief, loneliness. When he returns home with the second group of soldiers he is denied a hero's return. From here he spends time recounting false tales of his war times. Moving on, in the second page of the story he expresses want but what he reasons for not courting a female. A little while after he is given permission to use the car. About this time Krebs has an emotional exchange with both his little sister and his mother. Revealing that “he feels alienated from both the town and his parents , thinking that he had felt more ‘at home’ in Germany or France than he does now in his parent’s house”(Werlock). Next, the story ends with his mother praying for him and he still not being touched. Afterwards planning to move to Kansas city to find a job. Now, “The importance of understanding what Krebs had gone through in the two years before the story begins cannot be overstated. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been for the young man”(Oliver). Near the start of the story the author writes of the five major battles he “had been at”(Hemingway) in World War I- Bellaue Wood, Soissons, Champagne, St.Mihiel, and Argonne. The importance of these are shown sentences later that the
The nature of familial relationships are ever-changing and can be strongly affected by the societal values and expectations of the time. This is underpinned in Alan Seymour’s One Day of the Year (One Day) and Gwen Harwood’s “Father and Child” as well as “Suburban Sonnet”. These texts explore how differences in ideas due to external influences can cause tension which can either further estrange individuals or bring them closer together. They also delve into how gender roles can greatly impact familial relationships.
Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. "Family." Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History. Ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. Student Resources in Context. Web. 6 Mar. 2014.
It’s not easy to build an ideal family. In the article “The American Family” by Stephanie Coontz, she argued that during this century families succeed more when they discuss problems openly, and when social institutions are flexible in meeting families’ needs. When women have more choices to make their own decisions. She also argued that to have an ideal family women can expect a lot from men especially when it comes to his involvement in the house. Raymond Carver, the author of “Where He Was: Memories of My Father”, argued how his upbringing and lack of social institutions prevented him from building an ideal family. He showed the readers that his mother hide all the problems instead of solving them. She also didn’t have any choice but to stay with his drunk father, who was barely involved in the house. Carvers’ memoir is relevant to Coontz argument about what is needed to have an ideal family.
...y crying not knowing what to do then he turned and peered back to the Minnesota shore line. “It was as real as anything I would ever feel. I saw my parents calling to me from the far shoreline. I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk, the mayor and the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends and high school buddies. Like some weird sporting event: everybody screaming from the sidelines, rooting me on” (58). This is when he knew he could not turn his back on his beloved country. All the wrong he felt the draft was he could not cross the border to flee from anything or anyone. This whole situation describes the rest of his life, but mainly his years in the Vietnam War. He would have to make decisions, decisions that would be hard but would have to do for the ones he loved.
As with most narratives of this genre, the drama comes as a result of the conflict. The way in which conflict is used in this program is in part the reason for its use in understanding family dynamics and
In Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home”, Hemingway introduces us to a young American soldier, that had just arrived home from World War I. Harold Krebs, our main character, did not receive a warm welcome after his arrival, due to coming home a few years later than most soldiers. After arriving home, it becomes clear that World War I has deeply impacted the young man, Krebs is not the same man that headed off to the war. The war had stripped the young man of his coping mechanism, female companionship, and the ability to achieve the typical American life.
In “Soldier’s home” Krebs is completely different from when he left for the marines. He no longer sees the world the same. Instead he sees it as a place stuck in time with very little changes. He has to lie about things that happen in war to be able to stomach what truly happen. “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it”(1).
Having to live in a culturally diverse country such as the U.S. would influence many interpretations and adaptations to lifestyles from all over the world. Due to this, it has become customary to develop a social stereotype just being in a certain part of the world. But, everyone does their own things a little differently than the next, speak a little differently, eat different foods, and live their life a different way - but it works out. Two great example of this is in In A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, and Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty. These two short stories seek to expose myths about family relationships. Most people would assume that many Southern families are close knit and that there is a healthy relationship between every member. Welty and O’Connor challenged those stereotypes with their two short stories. It goes to show that although family relationships aren’t always perfect and these two examples show how these families fail to recognize the importance of each other.
The initial reaction I received from reading Soldier's Home, and my feelings about Soldier's Home now are not the same. Initially, I thought Harold Krebs is this soldier who fought for two years, returns home, and is disconnected from society because he is in a childlike state of mind, while everyone else has grown up. I felt that Krebs lost his immature years, late teens to early 20's, because he went from college to the military. I still see him as disconnected from society, because there isn't anyone or anything that can connect him to the simple life that his once before close friends and family are living. He has been through a traumatic experience for the past two years, and he does not have anyone genuinely interested in him enough to take the time to find out what's going on in his mind and heart. Krebs is in a battle after the battle.
When Krebs was in the army, he had a defined identity as a soldier and when he returns home Krebs’s reluctance to take the defined identity of the everyday joe shmoe that is awaiting him. Krebs difficulty to involve himself with the girls in his hometown reflects his refusal to conform to society’s expectation of him. Krebs associates his hometown girls as death to his individualism. All the girls in Krebs hometown look alike with their “round Dutch collars above their sweaters... their silk stockings and flat shoes,” (Hemingway; 49) and “their bobbed hair and the way they walked” (49). The strict uniformity of the girls that Krebs observes can be interpreted to resemble the uniformity of soldiers. Hemingway utilizes diction to illustrate Krebs’s opinion on the army’s forced conformity; “but they lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it” (49). In context of war, “alliances” is a word used between countries and in World War I it meant The Allies. Krebs using word “alliances...
Throughout time, family dynamics continually adapt to fit an always changing society. Using the sociological imagination, I can analyze my family’s history to understand the shift between Puritan farming life to the Industrial Era to the modern-day family I live in now.
As a first hand observer of the Civil War, the great American Poet, Walt Whitman once said,"The real war [of the mind] will never get in the books."Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a horrible mental ailment that afflicts thousands of soldiers every year. Besides the fact that it is emotionally draining for the soldier, it also deeply alters their family and their family dynamics. Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier's Home” illustrates how this happens. Harold Krebs returns home from World War I. He has to deal with becoming reaccustomed to civilian life along with relearning social norms. He must also learn about his family and their habits. The ramifications of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have a ripple effect on the lives of not only the victim, but also the friends and family they relate to.
Currently, families face a multitude of stressors in their lives. The dynamics of the family has never been as complicated as they are in the world today. Napier’s “The Family Crucible” provides a critical look at the subtle struggles that shape the structure of the family for better or worse. The Brice family is viewed through the lens of Napier and Whitaker as they work together to help the family to reconcile their relationships and the structure of the family.
The story, A Soldiers Home, is about a man in conflict with the past and present events in his life. The young man’s name is Harold Krebs. He recently returned from World War 1 to find everything almost exactly the same as when he left. He moved back into his parents house, where he found the same car sitting in the same drive way. He also found the girls looking the same, except now they all had short hair. When he returned to his home town in Oklahoma the hysteria of the soldiers coming home was all over. The other soldiers had come home years before Krebs had so everyone was over the excitement. When he first returned home he didn’t want to talk about the war at all. Then, when he suddenly felt the urge and need to talk about it no one wanted to hear about it. When he returned all of the other soldiers had found their place in the community, but Harold needed more time to find his place. In the mean time he plays pool, “practiced on his clarinet, strolled down town, read, and went to bed.”(Hemingway, 186) When his mother pressures him to get out and get a girlfriend and job, he te...