John Updike is a well-recognized American author known for his novels and short stories in the realm of fiction. His work was full of careful craftsmanship, a unique prose style, and his prolificacy. Updike populated his fiction with characters who frequently experience personal turmoil that the readers can relate to in their own lives. In his short story "Son" Updike is able to disgust parenthood and childhood in a creative and relatable way. The story disgusts the father son relationship throughout different time periods. Beginning in the turn of the century and ending his modern day of 1973. Throughout the piece you see what Updike calls the "Social Contract" being broken. This "Social Contract" is the idea that each generation will improve from the last, and that the son with trust and respect his father. The reader begins to see the no matter what the father has done for his son he is unappreciative and thinks that he will do better. The reader is able to see no matter the generation the partner is the same, which makes this piece timeless. Updike's work is disgusted by his the craftsmanship of his sentence structure and his poetic use of figurative language. His work also displays American life throughout seventy year. Updike is indeed a distinguished writer and worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.
Updike uses of parallel sentence structure and catalog distinguishes his writing from others. One look at the sentence structures and can tell the work is his. He uses a mixture of catalog and parallel structure to express the son's feelings toward the family, "He would like to destroy us, for we are, variously, too fat, too jocular, too sloppy, too affectionate, too grotesque and heedless in our ways," the son feels that his family is not good enough. Updike also uses parallel structure to form paragraphs. Starts a group of sentences with "His younger" and "His older" to express the son's feelings towards his siblings.
