The son is introduced to us in the first paragraph as the author transmits his feelings of the father waking up by the son. The son is imaged to the audience by him having orange fingers from the nicotine. It has also been investigated that the son has been on drugs:
“I have not touched the stuff since I came back.”
So this tells us that he has now stopped since he came back from being in London. In the past the son has been in London and it has been suspected that he was up to no good. The son thinks of his father as a nervous wreck:
“Your hand shakes in the morning, Da,”
This reveals that the father is scared and is taunted by the son’s questioning. The son also thinks of his dad as a woman, a mum: “he is an old woman.” The son treats his father with no respect:
“Why don’t you have a girl like everybody else?”
“If I know what you are doing I don’t worry as much.”
With each of these questions the son would reply to them by swearing at his father. I think of the son as being secretive, selfish and a cheeky person for the son does not care for anybody who cares too much for him such as his own father.
The father is additionally like the son who takes drugs, has a weapon in his bedroom for protection plus has a communication problem. The father is the one who wants to figure out about his son seeing if he is ok and what is happening to him:
“Where are you going today?”
“What do you be doing out at this time?”
“What do you talk about?”
In every one of these quotations, the father is asking the son everyday questions that parents ask which the son refuses to answer. The father wants his son most of all:
“I want you to talk.”
“I want to know what you think.”
“I want to know if you are in danger again.”
Bernard is repeating the words “I want,” conveying the fathers need to know his son but the father is incapable of finding the words to express his feelings, which leaves him unable to access his son. The father wants to remember the happier times when they shared their lives. Such as both of them being on the bus to quite days in Toome, how he taught him to tie a blood knot cast it and also how to fish. The father used to dig the garden, grow kinds of vegetable’s but now he stays in the house like a hermit in its shell and only goes out in the night. The father acts completely different now than what he used to, for now he has a weapon and also does the son. However in my opinion I think that the father feels very insecure and very much in denial, for the incident of the wife/mother.
Communication has a very extreme deal of importance behind it, for in this relationship between the father and son they have mighty communication barriers. The author Bernard Maclaverty draws the importance of their problems such as them living within a violent society with items of machinery. The destructive influence of drugs which is exposed through the character of the son is shown when he comes back from London while he is saying that he has not touched the stuff since he came back. The communication between the relationship, Bernard uses the terms Father and Son not as characters with names just so it can project to be any father or son. The father notices the gun under the son’s pillow but when the father asks, the son shouts out: “It’s none of your fucking business.” Then the door is shut by the son kicking it into the father’s despaired face. This is a valuable example of how far the communication between the father and son has broken down because of the father’s knowledge of his son, having possession of a gun.
In the last section there is bleakness and heartbreak because we discover that the son is brutally murdered by his own friends and so his father rushes out to support him and notices a hole that should not be there, a bullet hole, with blood gushing out from it. The father’s reaction to his son lying dead on the ground is that he answers:
“My son let me put my arms around you.”
In this quotation the father finally accomplished to put his arms around his son as an act of love. Its importance is telling the audience that, do not leave everything to the last minute say it immediately, to show how you feel.
The question is the difficulties which the characters face and also how the author has made it clear to me is by Bernard, really showing a big struggle for this relationship. Such as a father and son who are not compatible of communicating with each other and them being blocked from the society they live in. My feelings for the short story “Father and Son,” is that I feel communication barriers near my family so it’s really telling me to say what I need to say straight away and also the area they live in is really atrocious and dreadful which starts up a sinking attitude and behaviour to the victim.
