The face

There has always been something special about the relationship between a father and his son. The father might se himself in his son and is proud of everything he does, or the father might want to affect his son’s actions and choices in life. This is not always easy because a child sees the world with different eyes than an adult. A child can easily be lost in the adult’s world, and therefore the father must be careful when trying to make his son grow up. Even though the father might want his son to grow up fast, there are things that a child does not understand as well as an adult, and when a boy becomes scared or confused in life, the relationship between father and son is extra important.

In the short story “The Face”, we are introduced to such a father-son relationship. This relationship between the narrator and his father is characterised by the father’s ambitions and pride of his son and the son’s calmness around and obedience to his father. The narrator’s father works at a pit that is about to be shut down. While the father has been working there, a man named John Ireland is killed in the face of the pit. John was a boxer, and the narrator’s father once took his son to see John box. The narrator’s father has ambitions for his son, and the father wants his son to do well in life. “It was because he wanted to dream about his son being a champion boxer” LL. 30-31 p. 125. It is said that the father at times wants his son to walk in front of him, which makes the father able to look at his son and to continue dreaming about his future. The narrator’s father cannot wait for the narrator to grow up and become a man like his father. This is shown when the father makes his son go into the dark tunnel on his own. The father asks if the son is frightened, but the son wants to be brave and says no. The reason the father wants his son to go on alone, is because the father wants to test his son and see how grown up he has become. “He was laughing and saying he was proud, proud of him because he’d walked down on his own, proud because now he was a man.” LL. 13-14 P. 126. This is what the father says after the son has walked further on his own. The father is very proud of his son, and that he walked that far all alone. The father is mostly proud because he wanted his son to be brave like a real man, and he pasted the test.

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Already from the start, when the narrator and his father are walking into the pit, the son is frightened by the darkness in it. He has his father besides him, which helps him to keep calm, when he is frightened. The narrator meets the world with the eyes of a child. This is shown when the father is telling him about the bogeys that used to be in the pit. The narrator immediately starts thinking about bogeymen, and even though he knows that this is not what his father is talking about, he has to make sure. It is after this incident that the father wants to test his son, and lets him go on his own into the tunnel. It could be the son’s questioning about bogeymen that has made the father unsure of how brave his son actually is. The son does not only fear the dark, but in fact he mostly fears the face. The son has only heard negative words associated with the face, and therefore he connects it with fear. “One of them has said he’d be quite happy never to see the face again.” LL. 12 p. 123. And “Because somebody had got killed at the face”. LL. 18 p. 123. The last quotation is from a whole incident the narrator remembers, which was when he first heard about the face. That he remembers all of this, including the fact that his dad had to kiss his mother to calm her down afterwards, really shows how important and strong his impression of the face is. Of course no one would blame anyone for thinking bad about the face after hearing all this, and what is more notable here is that the narrator has not understood what the face really is. He thinks it is just a face of a man instead of a part of the pit, which it really is. This shows that the narrator is only a child, since the only face he can think of is the face of a man. His childish naivety is shown in the fact that he actually believes that there is a man’s face inside the pit. A grown up would consider whether this was likely or not several times before believing it. And believing it a grown up never would, since they would know that a face simple cannot exist without a man being attached to it, and that this man would not be in the pit for no reason. This set of thoughts is unlikely to occur inside a child’s head.

The themes of the story are the relationship between father and son as well as a child’s interpretation of the world. It is very accurate described through dialogue how the relationship between the narrator and his father is, and through the actions and thoughts we follow coming from the narrator, we see how a child meets the world. Through this story, it becomes clear to us as readers that a father is very important to his son and most certainly also the other way around.