“A Conversation with My Father’’

The story

The story is based on a conversation between the narrator and her bedridden father. The father requested that his daughter compose a simple tale. The daughter didn’t like the type of story her father was asking her to write because it followed the plotline to the end and removed all possibility of a better outcome; she said yes to her father just to make him happy. The lady tells her father about a woman and her children. To keep the relationship going, the son began using cocaine, and the mother followed suit. The son gave up on drugs after a while and broke up with the mother whom he perceived as disgusting, and the woman began missing her son. The father is unhappy with the story and tells his daughter that she fears tragedy in life and in fiction. However, the daughter protests her father’s sentiments and argues that she is different from her protagonist. The narrator then tells the story to her father for the second time, but this time adding the words ‘the end’ to mark the conclusion of the story. Although the father is unhappy with the story, he is pleased that his daughter has indicated the end of the story using the correct words.

Style

In the fiction, there are two stories, one story recounts about a middle-aged woman and her bedridden father and together, they discuss the daughter’s attitude towards tragedy in fiction and real life. Another story is that of a woman and son where both were drug addicts, but the son left her mother after he overcame the habit of taking drugs.

Metafiction

‘A Conversation with My father’ is a metafictional story. The narrators’ descriptions on story writing, the inclusion of the story within the story and the conversation of the father and the narrator about fiction are elements of metafiction. The metafictional stories do prompt reader to think why writers the development of writers’ stories is as they are, what the expectation of the readers from the story is and how the stories are structured (Levine). The discussion between father and daughter are made up of the issues mentioned above. The father asks why the narrator loves writing simple stories of people she is familiar with rather than writing about people whom she does not know (Hammad). To the narrator, the fiction should reflect someone’s experience in life. The fiction can be considered by the readers in two viewpoints, either simple tragic as the narrator’s father would like or open-ended story with no straightforward plot as the narrator would like. The metafictional element in the story causes readers to reflect on the theme, structure of both the story and the fiction.

Themes

The theme represents dominating ideas in the literature work. It also indicates the moral lessons in a story (Soule, et al.).The themes in the story include art and experience and limitations and opportunities.

Art and Experience

The conversation between daughter and father represents how real life should be presented in fiction. The experience of the lives of both the daughter and the father brings out different expectations for fiction. The father wishes the narrator would write stories with tragic end while the narrator, on the other hand, believes that things are open to change and loves writing open-ended stories which reflect real life.

Limitations and Opportunities

The daughter does not love the kind of stories the father loves because they are limiting. The hatred stems from the fact that everyone deserves open destiny to life while on the other hand, the father believes that the woman in the story has no ‘character’ and will have a tragic ending. The daughter says that the woman is just forty. The characters of the two stories present opportunities, limitation, and change from the different views and experience.

Works Cited

Hammad, Lamia K. “The Art of Storytelling as an Exploration of Re-writing Gender Roles in Grace Paley’s A Conversation with My Father.” Epiphany, 2016, epiphany.ius.edu.ba/index.php/epiphany/article/viewFile/195/155.

Levine, Jeremy A. “Metafiction as a Genre Fiction.” Clark Digital Commons--knowledge, Creativity, Research, and Innovation of Clark University, Oct. 2015, commons.clarku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=surj.

Soule, Daniel P., et al. “Writing for Scholarly Journals.” University of Glasgow:: Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 2015, www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41223_en.pdf.