The narrator’s father Character Analysis

There are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth.

When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.

Magazines and books covered the bureau and competed with the clothes for domination of the chair. They further overbur­dened the heroic little table and lay on top of the radio. They filled a baffling and unknowable cave beneath the bed, and in the corner by the bureau they spilled from the walls and grew up from the floor.

By about the ninth or tenth grade my sisters one by one discovered my father’s bedroom, and then the change would begin. Each would go into the room one morning when he was out. She would go with the ideal hope of imposing order or with the more practical objective of emptying the ashtray, and later she would be found spellbound by the volume in her hand.

In the winter they sent him a picture which had been taken on the day of the singing. On the back it said, “To Our Ernest Hemingway” and the “Our” was underlined. There was also an accompanying letter telling how much they had enjoyed them­selves, how popular the tape was proving and explaining who Ernest Hemingway was. In a way it almost did look like one of those unshaven, taken-in-Cuba pictures of Hemingway.

“I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”

On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold and there are no sign­ posts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so care­ fully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father, like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.

There are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth.

When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.

Magazines and books covered the bureau and competed with the clothes for domination of the chair. They further overbur­dened the heroic little table and lay on top of the radio. They filled a baffling and unknowable cave beneath the bed, and in the corner by the bureau they spilled from the walls and grew up from the floor.

By about the ninth or tenth grade my sisters one by one discovered my father’s bedroom, and then the change would begin. Each would go into the room one morning when he was out. She would go with the ideal hope of imposing order or with the more practical objective of emptying the ashtray, and later she would be found spellbound by the volume in her hand.

In the winter they sent him a picture which had been taken on the day of the singing. On the back it said, “To Our Ernest Hemingway” and the “Our” was underlined. There was also an accompanying letter telling how much they had enjoyed them­selves, how popular the tape was proving and explaining who Ernest Hemingway was. In a way it almost did look like one of those unshaven, taken-in-Cuba pictures of Hemingway.

“I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”

On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold and there are no sign­ posts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so care­ fully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father, like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.