My Father's Relationship With His Father Rhetorical Devices

The author recounts his relationship with his father as a young boy and comes to realize that despite his fathers seemingly cruel behavior towards him and their contrasting visions on life, his father had an ultimate responsibility, to be, “a pillar of the family,” which was weighing his father down, which in turn weighed him down. The author makes this point by structuring the passage into three segments, each being distinguished from each other by his shift of tone. In the first segment his tone is unwelcoming of his father evident in the contrast between the boy’s predictions on how his father would look like based on photos from before the war, and the gruesome reality from after the war. The second segment instills a tone of fear of

The contrast between the, “boyish”, junior officer his mother had shown him in photo and the roughness he had witnessed absolutely, “mortified”, him. He even questioned his father’s right to belong in his mother’s household. However, he later proceeds to describes his father’s initial perception of him being a, “beamish three-year old he might have not looked forward to,” and states that his father was, “obviously unused to children anyway.” The similarity between the father’s initial view of his own son and his initial reaction to his father’s arrival serve as foreshadowing to his conclusion made in the third segment of the

The son begins by recounting his father’s interaction with him the afternoon when his father carried his soon by the foot and suspended him over a pool of mosquito larvae. His father stated that it was only a game, but what his father had known as a simple game, in his eyes was, “slaughter,” and, “murder.” These conflicting views highlight the fundamental differences between their views on life, one from a battle scared veteran and the other from a naïve little three-year-old boy. In fact, the boy’s reaction to his father’s game serves as a confirmation of his father fears, that his boy was going turn into a “milksop.” Additionally, through the boy’s fearful reactions to common paternal beatings and his introduction to chores, which the young boy’s reaction to chores describes as a, “cold world of duties,” it becomes blatantly obvious to the reader that his mother had blinded him from the real world by creating a false paradise. This accentuates to the reader that his father’s paternal influence was