51 pages • 1 hour read
Grace PaleyA Conversation with My Father
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Allusion
An allusion is a passing reference to something that is widely known outside the world of the text. In “A Conversation with My Father,” allusions are usually references to other literary works, in particular, the Jewish Torah and the Christian New Testament. The second version of the story that the writer tells describes the mother’s kitchen as being stocked with “honey and milk”—an allusion to Exodus’s description of Israel. Moreover, the title of the girl’s periodical is an adaptation of the following biblical passage from the gospel according to Matthew: “Man does not live by bread alone” (Paragraph 30).
The significance of these allusions lies in the ironic way that Paley employs them. The mother’s kitchen is only a promised land for drug addicts, and the girl’s periodical is devoted to health food—a subject that seems trivial in comparison to Jesus’s words. By referring to these religious passages, Paley highlights the petty concerns and self-deceptions that preoccupy her characters. However, Paley’s motive is not simply to poke fun at the mother and girl. By using religious passages in reference to her characters’ ordinary lives, Paley also undercuts the seriousness of those passages. In other words, Paley’s use of allusion mirrors postmodernist skepticism of the “grand narratives” of earlier eras, which attempted to provide an overarching and unified vision of the world.
Metafiction
Like many postmodernist works, “A Conversation with My Father” talks explicitly about fiction and literary convention and, therefore, continuously reminds the reader of its own fictionality. This self-conscious form of writing is known as “metafiction,” and it can serve multiple purposes. In some instances, for example, writers draw attention to the ways in which their narrative is constructed in order to underscore the broader ways in which people are constantly creating their own realities.
Personal perspective certainly plays a role in “A Conversation with My Father.” The debate surrounding the story of the drug-addicted mother encapsulates each character’s fundamental understanding of how the world works. The writer’s father views life as tragic, while the writer sees it in a more open-ended light. These attitudes themselves reflect different literary schools. The writer’s father admires nineteenth-century writers such as Chekhov and Maupassant not only because they feature “recognizable” people and situations but also because they share his tragic sensibility (Paragraph 2). Maupassant, in particular, is associated with naturalism—a literary movement that depicts human life as governed by social and scientific forces beyond our individual control. By contrast, the writer embraces a postmodernist style, which isn’t necessarily more optimistic. Instead, postmodernism tends to treat life as too complex and contradictory to be summed up in a single narrative arc (tragic or otherwise). In this sense, the entire story can be read as a commentary on the kinds of stories we choose to tell and why we tell them.
Tone
In literature, tone refers to the author’s attitude towards his or her subject. Depending on things like diction (word choice), the same sequence of events might strike readers as comical, sad, or frustrating. In “A Conversation with My Father,” tone is at the heart of the father’s objections to his daughter’s writing. Even before learning that the story of the woman and her son doesn’t (in his daughter’s mind, at least) end tragically, the father feels that the story isn’t tragic enough. The plot itself might be sad, but the daughter relates it in a way that is neutral or funny. In the first draft, the writer speaks in such matter-of-fact and generalized terms that it is all but impossible to become emotionally invested in the story. However, in the second draft, she seems to occasionally poke fun at her subject. For example, the writer undercuts the seriousness of the mother’s grief by describing her tears first as “terrible” and then as “time-consuming,” as though the worst thing about them is their wastefulness (Paragraph 35).
Of course, tone also plays a role in the frame story of the father and his daughter. However, while this story shares the same narrator as the embedded stories, its tone is very different. Most notably, the writer is much more reflective in the frame story than she is in her straightforward account of the mother’s descent into addiction. She spends a significant amount of time discussing her reasons for disliking conventional narrative. Her rationale makes it clear that she’s not (as her father implies) simply being flippant for the sake of flippancy: “[The woman] is my knowledge and my responsibility. I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity)” (Paragraph 45). In other words, the writer’s tone reflects her compassion as well as her awareness of the how life can prove tragic.
