"A Conversation with My Father".
"A Conversation with My Father" may have seemed like a random conversation between a father and his child, but if one was to dig deeper into the dialogue there is a very interesting view on life presented differently through the characters. Two opposite sides of the age spectrum create an image of how their experience with life affects their perspective on the world.
Even though there isn't a lot of specifics revealed about the characters we know that the father is an older man at the age of eighty-six and basically in his death bed. He sees things from a traditional viewpoint, and isn't very accepting of how society is in the present time. It is obvious that he prefers the customs and ways of the past when he says to his child, "I would like you to write a simple story just once more.the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write."(161). When the child tells his/her father the story that he/she has written about the woman with the drug addiction, his response is, "Tragedy! Plan tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end."(167). The father's negative view on life and how people are living in the current time are a reflection of his stubbornness. Instead of trying to understand how times have changed he simply criticizes it. With all of his years of experience with people perhaps he has lost faith in society.
On the other side there is the son or daughter who is younger and has a modern way of looking at things. The story that he/she writes involves many advanced ideas such as a mother who, in order to stay close to her son, joins him and his friends in become drug addicts. In response to the father's negative comments about the woman in the story the child says, "Oh Pa.She could change" (167). The child also says, "No, Pa, it could really happen that way, it's a funny world nowadays." (167) when he/she is telling the end of the story where the mother gets over her addiction and finds a good job .