Parental Expectations and Personal Choices: A Tale of Betrayal

“The Act” by Adam Haslett narrates a story about a young man growing up and acting against his father’s wishes. The man grew up in Toledo, Ohio where his father worked for the union. As a young adult, he went to college to study liberal arts, excelling in each class to the point where his professor recommends him to graduate school. The man thought about the offer, but instead decides to attend law school, subsequently earning him a position as a ball buster, an act that his father warned him not to take prior to seeing him off for college. He supports his new family with the money he makes as a ball buster. Suddenly, the man’s father falls ill. The man visits his ill father and confronts him about his occupation. Times flies after his father’s death, the man urges his son Gabriel to run with him. The man trips, the impact injuring him so great he’s dying. The man keeps Gabriel by his side as he’s dying, awaiting condemnation. “The Act” suggests that acting against the wishes of a parent may lead to feelings of betrayal and a shattered pride.

Parents’ pride and joy lies within their children. They hold expectations and hopes

for their children to develop necessary skills and passion for their future occupations as they grow up to acquire higher education and other necessary means for a comfortable life. When children deviates from the expectations, a sense of betrayal and disappointment emerges. Such is the case with the man when he reveals the nature of his job. The feeling of betrayal and disillusionment reveals itself in the father’s physical reaction when “his temple distend with blood and start to pulse [and] red blooms on his wrinkled cheeks” (3). The man knowingly deviates from his father’s only wish to not dwell into ball-busting business, creating a strain between him and his father.
The climax of this story manifest when the man confronts his father in order to relieve the burden of his secrecy. The scene is the climax of the story because it depicts the primary conflict, the remorse the man feels for betraying his father’s wishes. The secondary conflict details the source of the strain, union busting. Evidently, this conflict is an external one, provided by the description of the man’s job, “the client’s goal is to acquire a struggling company and sell its parts for a profit, dissolving it in the process. Among the things that complicate the deal are labor contracts that the target company may have with unionized employees” (2). In addition to, this description clarifies how the secondary conflict contributes to the primary conflict: the operations of the job discloses why the father is so against ball-busting. Involving himself with the opposing political party creates the source of the strain and burden the man feels remorse for, thus, the primary conflict is an internal one. When the man was “under no illusion” about the procedures, he kept his job confidential, depicting the start of the primary conflict (2). “But it eats at him” denotes the development of the climax as caused by the primary conflict (2). Furthermore, the man felt so burdened by his job, he discloses the fact to his mom, only to realize the pride his father felt about him (2). However, while those scenes aid the development of the climax, the transitional scene to his father’s death bed display the man’s integrity as a resolve for concealing and betraying his father’s one wish (3). The primary conflict leads to the climax by developing the man’s resolve to be forthright with his father before his father dies under the impression that the man’s been living how his father wanted to. While the primary conflict is seemingly resolve, as the story progress, the man doesn’t feel satisfy with his forthrightness. He “awaits his condemnation” as punishment for distressing and betraying his father, but it never happens as he “is released, unpunished and unseen, into the realm of the dead” (4). To conclude, the man never got his resolve.
The story primarily takes place in the mid-eastern states of the United States in the 1980s where the fight between unions and corporations persist. The author uses opposing settings of the man’s occupational environment to the father’s home in order to symbolize destruction and security. The author describes the physical setting of the man’s by describing the man’s occupation. As for the father’s environment, the author develops the symbolism of security through the man’s concerns. The man’s immediate family moving to the suburb and now retired suggest contentment and security. The foundations the man’s father worked to get there paid off and now the father lives his life with pride in his son. On the contrary, the man’s environment is the embodiment of everything against the father’s foundation that created the security.The setting portrays cognitive dissonance in the man, briefly displaying the trait of self-deception. “What he does have no bearing immediate bearing on his father” portrays cognitive dissonance in which two conditions are met: the man knows he’s wrong, but rationalizes no harm will be done if he continues. The man’s concerns reveals the conflict man versus self, the central conflict of the story.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was elected president, who vowed to reshapened the United States after inheriting the worst economical state caused by the Great Depression (shmoop). While Reagan was praised for his efforts to rebuild the economy, “he was one of the most anti-labor presidents in U.S. history” (Meister 1). One of the many aspects of Reagan’s anti-labor law is union busting, which our main character, “the man,” involve himself with (Meister 2). The purpose of a union is to protect the rights of employees and ensure that wages, hours, and contracts are fair, aspect of labor that Reagan ignored and continue to demolish by subsequently closing a fraction of OSHA, undermining workers’ safety (Meister 2).
The man’s father who once worked for a labor union feels threatened by union buster and urges the man not to participate because it goes against everything the father once was, a worker.

In regards to demanding him to stay away from ball busting business, it can be interpreted as protection for him, his political stance, and every working citizens in the United States. The father doesn’t want him to turn into an antagonist, but rather strive for an occupation that ignites passion from the man. The father once said, “I’m just saying, remember what brought you here” to allude to the hardship he fought against with the help of the union to ensure proper employee care. By becoming a ball-buster, the man completely disregarded his father’s hardship and strength to raise him to become the man he is present, which cause the strain between the

two.