My Fathers Tears by John Updike Essay

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Father's Tears"

In his short story "My Father's Tears," author John Updike contrasts his childhood perceptions of his father's tears as the father sent his son away to college on the train with a present-day perspective. As an older man, the narrator now understands what seemed like sentimentality. The young narrator was merely impatient to grow up and was impatient with his father. The main point of the story is the inaccessibility of knowledge and the limited perspective of the young until it is too late. Although Updike's story is very much a product of its place and time -- a mid-20th century New England still filled with old-fashioned Transcendentalists, commuters who go to the city by train, and a society in which smoking is a rite of passage -- the relationships between parents and sons are eternal.

Much of the story evolves in a series of comparisons between the narrator's father and mother and his experience of his ex-wife's Unitarian father.

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Deb's father was an austere, competent man who died from Alzheimer's, in contrast to the narrator's more conventional father who blamed all of his own marital trouble on 'women's issues.' The families were different both in temperament and faith: although a minister, Deb's family did not believe in dogma, while the narrator's family refused to do work on Sunday. Ultimately, the differences between Deb and the narrator were too much, something his father blamed on Deb's lack of femininity. The narrator, now older and wiser, can appreciate his father despite his father's faults and also appreciate his father's sentimentality, however imperfect the past might be.

People are both changing and unchanging in the story. On one hand, age takes away people's minds and bodies. On the other hand, during the narrator's reunion, he envisions everyone….....

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