Key Features of Laverty's Father and Son

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Describe the key features if a short story you have enjoyed, saying what has impressed you most about it. “Father and Son” is written by Bernard Mac Laverty. One of the main themes of “Father and Son” is the breakdown of a family relationship. A main feature of “Father and Son” is repetition and this feature helps to show the relationship between the father and son. Another feature is tones, each character reveals different examples of tones. The son has an aggressive tone, while the father has a caring and almost frail tone. These key features help the reader to enjoy the short story “Father and Son”. “Father and Son” helps to highlight the theme of family breakdown after the boss of a family member. This can be shown by “I love him so much it hurts but he won’t talk to me”. This shows the father tries to keep a close bond between them both. However, the son wants to create a large distance between them this maybe because of him growing up and wanting to become an adult. These helps most readers to relate to the characters and enjoy this book as most readers have been teenagers or are parents and can sympathize with their situation. This father and son relationship is very strained. A previous incident it is suggested that the son was close to death. The reader can pick this up with the quotation “Look, Da, I have not touched the stuff since I came back”. This helps to explain why the father has became so needy to be a part of his son’s life, because they have already lost a family member and almost losing his son scared him deeply, however this incidentally pushes his son further away. The father cares greatly for his son. The writer helps us to understand this by not naming the son. This encourages the repetition of “my son”, which shows the pride and love this father has for his son. This helps us to comprehend the pain the father feels about the distance in his relationship with his son. The pleasure of understanding and empathizing with the father helps us to enjoy “Father and Son”. The tone is very important in this short story as it helps to increase the knowledge of each character. The son, for instance, has a very aggressive tone as the reader may expect from a young frustrated man, an example of that is “I would like to slap his face and make a man out of him”.

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