Fathers, Sons, and Inheritance Theme Analysis

Home Fire includes two very different father-son relationships: the relationship between British politician Karamat Lone and his son, Eamonn, and the relationship between jihadi Adil Pasha and his son, Parvaiz. Eamonn and Parvaiz both walk in the shadows of their fathers’ legacies as they wonder how to carve their own paths in the world. Eamonn tries to live up to his father’s expectations of strength and determination despite the fact that he lives in a world of privilege that his father never had. Parvaiz, on the other hand, abandons the life that his sisters have created for him in order to follow in his father’s footsteps. Shamsie thus illustrates how a son’s sense of inheritance from his father can become an inescapable burden as the son tries to define his own individual life.

Parvaiz, who never knew his father, ends up trying to recreate his Adil’s life in order to better understand his own purpose. Parvaiz meets Farooq, a cousin of one of Parvaiz’s friends in the neighborhood. Farooq tells stories about Adil that Parvaiz has never known, because Adil was arrested in Afghanistan and then died of a seizure while being transported to Guantánamo. These are “stories of his father for which he’d always yearned—not a footloose boy or feckless husband but a man of courage who fought injustice, saw beyond the lie of national boundaries, kept his comrades’ spirits up through times of darkness.” Parvaiz digests these stories readily, eager to see his father as a hero rather than a villain—someone he can then emulate. This eagerness demonstrates Parvaiz’s need to define himself through his father’s life.

Parvaiz’s desire to connect with his father grows when Farooq has several of his cousins chain Parvaiz to the floor in an unbearable crouch for hours and then waterboard him. At first Parvaiz is traumatized and upset, but then he thinks that he is becoming more and more like his father. Later, he asks to have the torture repeated, saying, “I want to feel my father’s pain.” This statement again reinforces the idea that Parvaiz feels the burden of his father’s absence and that he wants to experience the same things in order to define himself. Parvaiz finally goes to Raqqa, Syria to try and meet other men who might have known his father and to aid in the effort for which his father fought: Islamic supremacy. Yet it is during this time that Parvaiz recognizes the folly of his actions in trying to  become like his father. He learns that the men of his father’s generation who fought jihad in Bosnia, Chechnya, or Kashmir all went home to their families in the winter. This information makes Parvaiz “blubber into his pillow at night, not because it makes him understand that his father never loved him (though he does understand that), but because he finally sees that he’s becoming his father in negative ways rather than positive ones. Too late, Parvaiz recognizes the harm in defining himself through a man who abandoned him: by running away from his sisters, Parvaiz is repeating the same betrayal.

Eamonn, too, feels the burden of his father’s legacy on his shoulders, particularly because Karamat doesn’t believe that Eamonn can live up to it. This causes Eamonn to try instead to prove that he can be his own person and step outside of his father’s shadow—an action which ultimately causes his own downfall. Initially, Eamonn conveys the love and admiration he has for his father to Isma, saying that fathers are “guides into manhood” for sons. He describes the relationship further: “We want to be like them, we want to be better than them. We want to be the only people in the world who are allowed to be better than them." Eamonn thus illustrates his own deep-seated need to live up to his father’s legacy—and to outshine it. Yet Eamonn also sees how his identity is complicated by his father’s perception of him. Growing up, Karamat would say to Eamonn, “Who is this posh English boy with my face, […] sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with pride. Who you made me, so blame yourself, the son would reply, and his father would respond with either There is no blame, my jaan, my life or That was your mother's doing, not mine.” Eamonn thus understands that he has a privilege his father did not have; he has grown up in comfort in Britain, cushioned by his mother’s family’s wealth, so he’ll never really be able to work as hard as Karamat did. Therefore, it is impossible to walk completely in Karamat’s footsteps or gain the resilience that he had. After Parvaiz dies and Karamat refuses to allow Aneeka to bring her brother’s body home to Britain, Eamonn is determined to defy Karamat in order to stand up for himself. He posts a video message online, imploring his father to see reason, and then he travels to Pakistan in order to (as Karamat puts it) “prove to his father he [has] a spine.” His actions are intended to support Aneeka, but perhaps more importantly, they’re intended to defy Karamat, highlighting again how the weight of a father’s legacy can drive a son to extreme measures.

Through Parvaiz and Eamonn, Shamsie illustrates how the legacy of a father to a son becomes inescapable. It is Isma who connects the two characters when she hears Eamonn defend his father’s actions early in the book: “It didn’t matter if they were on this or that side of the political spectrum, or whether the fathers were absent or present, or if someone else had loved them better, loved them more: in the end they were always their fathers’ sons.” Ultimately, for both men, the attempts to escape their father’s shadows results in their own deaths—deaths borne of their fathers’ actions. Parvaiz is killed while trying to escape the organization that his father fought for; Eammon killed in retribution for his father’s discriminatory policies. These endings argue that the cycle of sons measuring themselves against their fathers can lead to fatal consequences.