“A Conversation with my Father” by Grace Paley Essay

A Conversation with My obtain is a fictional falsehood well-nigh a young woman and her dying beginner. At his bedside, he asks her to key a story. She tells a tragic story of a cleaning woman who gets refer in doses because of her son but then the son leaves her and she is stuck in the drug livingstyle. She soon after decides to get her life story back on footstep and she succeeds in doing so. The yield rejects the girls ending because he believes that she is avoiding tragedy. Through ambiguity and intension in the conversation between miss and let, Grace Paley shows that people atomic number 18 often afraid(p) of confronting tragedy or even accepting it.Paley repeats the enunciate end through bug out the story. The father in A Conversation with My Father is the one that uses both discourses the most. In cable lengths 6-7, the father vocalizes, unworthy woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools to live among fools. The end. The end. The father at first sho ws some sort of sympathy by recognizing that this woman was not in the best condition but he goes on to say that it is the end. By the end he means the end of her life and that her life cannot get back on track no consequence what. Anytime that the narrator uses the record book end it is meant to pull out the end of the drug swipe woman in the daughters story (Lines 6-8, 14).Grace Paley also has repetition of the word tragedy. The word tragedy is also ambiguous throughout the story. In line of reasoning 9, the father says, what a tragedy. The end of a person. In this line the fathers role of the word tragedy is not ambigious because it is clear that he is describing the end of the gravel in the story. In line 14 the father says, Tragedy limpid tragedy Historical tragedy In these lines it is unsure in what condition that father is talk of the tget about tragedy. It is hard to tell whether he is talking about the character from the story or his own daughter. It seems like he is most likely talking about his daughter because in the line before that he says, You dont want to recognize it. The you refers to the daughter and the it refers to tragedy. The father believes that a weakness of his daughter is that she does not recognize or accept tragedy.The fashion of the word tragedy and end together is what helps get Grace Paleys take down across to the readers in this story. In some(prenominal) lines the fathermentions both course together in order to show that people are afraid of confronting tragedy or even accepting it (Lines 9, 14). In line 9 the father states that the end of a person is tragic but the daughter goes on to show her navet ness by verbalise that it does not take hold to be the m early(a)s end because in reality, the mother could go on to be successful at her current job or become even more successful at something else. It is this mind in the story when the father tells the daughter that her writing is no good because she does not re cognize tragedy and therefore there is no hope for her. aft(prenominal) he tells her that there is no hope for her, he goes on to say The end.In that point in the story the sound out is used to describe how the father feels about his daughters future (Line 14). In the last line the father says, Tragedy You too. When allow you look it in the face? Here he is pointing out his daughters refusal to recognize or accept tragedy. He is calling her a tragedy because she will not recognize tragedy. At every point in the story before this, the author either used the word tragedy when talking about the mother from the story or about purchase order as a whole but this is the point in the story when he lets his true feelings out. The father believes that bon ton as a whole chooses not to recognize tragedy just like his daughter. He wants to show his daughter that she is turning into a tragedy because she will not accept tragedy like the rest of society. The father seems to believe that if yo u do not make tragedy a reality then you will become a tragedy yourself.Although there are specific examples throughout the story to show how the father believes that the daughter denies tragedy, there are several parts where the father also comments on the navet of society when it comes to tragedy. In line 6 the father says, born in a time of fools to live among fools. The word fools refers to society as a whole. The father is trying to say that we are all navet because noone recognizes tragedy. He continues in this line to use the phrase the end (Line 6). The connotation of the phrase the end changes in this line. In this line it more refers to the entire universal population instead of the specifically the mother from the story or his own daughter even though it seems like that is what he is referring to.In lines 22-23 the daughter says, Im sorry for her. Im not going to leave her there in that reside crying (Actually neither would Life,which unlike me has no pity.) By stating that the daughter shows that she does not believe in tragedy and that she refuses to let a story have a bad ending because it is immoral. This line not only shows that the daughter will not recognize tragedy but the second part, where she states that life would not leave the mother in the same condition either, proves that society feels the same way about tragedy. The phrase in the parentheses is interesting because it points out that life itself would not accept tragedy even though in general life pities no one. The whole point shows that although we as a people generally do not pity anyone or anything, we do make an acceptation for tragedy.The word tragedy and end are cardinal very strong words in this short story. No other words would get the authors point across. The author used them ambiguously in order to get her point across to the audience. The father uses the story that he had his daughter tell to show her tragedy. He hoped to show her that people are afraid of it and that they often do not recognize it. He wanted her to realize her own tragedy before it led to her end because he believed that denying tragedy is what leads to failure or the end.