April Shen

ENGL 123

DuLaney-Greger

9/7/2017

The ending of the story of life

Summary:

In the story from Grace Paley A conversation with my father, a brief yet meaningful

conversation with the narrator and her father about the theme of death and attitudes toward

tragedies in life were described. The story was started with a scene in the hospital. The narrators

father was dying on the bed and he asked the narrator to tell a simple story for him. Although the

narrator was not appreciate stories that close all the opportunities, she used something happened

to her neighbor and created an extremely short and odd one based on that story for her father on

purpose. This story illustrated a woman who became a junkie just in order to keep a closer

relationship with her son who was also a junkie. However, her son left her in depression anyway.

The narrators father wasnt satisfied with the ending that she gave and he wanted the narrator to

rewrite it with more details. The second version of her story was filled with details and the

characters were more rounded. This time, the son was rescued by a proselytizing girl and he

decided to pursue his spiritual satisfactions. He asked his mother that whether she wanted to do it

with him. However, his mother was not able to leave drug so her son left her and told her that he

would not come back unless she quit drugs for sixty days. The mother was depressed for her

sons leaving and the story ended. The narrators father was very angry about this ending for its
undefined situation and he warned the narrator to face the tragedy in her life as well which was

referring his death.

Analysis:

There were only two main characters in this story who were the narrator and her dying

father. There was just a very brief illustration of the background of the father but according to

conversations that he had with his daughter, his personality was revealed. He was a person who

held a strong curiosity toward life and although his body cannot be controlled by his brain

anymore, his head was still fill with, like what the narrator described, the brainy light (68).

After her finishing the first story, he was long to know more about the mother like how were her

parents and he thought it was interesting that she became such a person (68). He wanted to

know what had shaped that mother into how she was and this revealed his intelligence in life and

how he has a strong enthusiasm for life. The fathers reaction to the second version of her story

was wrathful. He kept rejecting the narrators positive imaginations about the mothers future

and his line In our own life, too, you have to look it in the face (71) was repeated twice by him

with vexation. Because of his passion for life, the father showed pessimism about the mothers

situation in the narrators story because she reminded him about himself. Lying on the edge of

the cliff of his life, being sick and weak, he could relate himself with the lonely mother who was

left by her son in the story at some points so seeing her daughter giving the mother an ending

like this and still holding an positive attitude made him angry so he was trying to force his

daughter to face the tragedy in her life which was his death as well.
 By using the first person point of view, this story surprisingly did not contain too much

information or emotion about the narrator herself. However, the narrator had a kind of humor

reflected from the way she wrote her stories. Because her father wanted to hear a simple story,

the narrator just followed exactly what he wanted and even exaggerated the briefness of her first

version a little. This behavior showed that she was trying to tool with him and because of her

humor, readers could feel her love to her father as well. When it came to her preference of

stories, her attitude toward life was exposed. Although she made the characters in her story feel

lonely and hopeless at the end, she still believed that she was not going to leave her there in that

house crying. (Actually neither would life, which unlike me has no pity) (71). Her optimism

toward life gave her the strong faith that life would be better no matter how depressed the

situation was at that moment. By building a strong contrast between the narrator and her fathers

attitude toward tragedies, the theme of this story was built up.

Interpretation:

The external conflict in this essay was the narrator and her fathers different preferences

for stories which enhanced the theme of opposite attitudes toward tragedies. The question that

the author brought into this essay was whether we should be open to our lives and always be

hopeful toward lives or we should be like her father who was trying to persuade his daughter that

she should face the reality that one day, all hopes would come to an end because life was a story

with a close end. Although the author didnt give readers a clear answer and left with an open

ending again, her tone throughout the story vaguely implied that she had a tendency to support
the narrators opinion more. However, the conversation with her father also revealed that she

completely respected her fathers idea as well. The narrator preferred to treat this world with an

open and positive attitude was not because that she didnt realize her fathers sickness but was

due to her love to her father and she didnt want to bring any more sadness to him. The narrator

and her father were both standing for different life attitudes and this story brought readers an

inspiration of how should we treat the tragedies in our lives.