A common theme the author makes use of throughout this story that particularly stuck with me was the use of hidden or lost things. The author seems to conceal what exact illness the father is suffering from in this story, only that he was told he has a chemical imbalance in his brain by his doctor. This illness is not enough to stop the narrators’ father from doing what he loves and diving at the lake house, but it was obviously a pivotal point in his life due to the shock therapy he underwent and that he needed to be institutionalized for it as well. The hidden facets of the fathers’ life that come to light later in the story put our perspective firmly into the shoes of the narrator, who is a young adolescent that has only a basic understanding of the world.
Another item of note that is concealed in this story is what kind of relationship the narrators’ parents have with each other. The disagreement they have over which church to attend and the arguments over the father taking his medication lead us to believe that they do not get along in the same way as they used to, but the author withholds the explanation why from us. Overall, the author does a very efficient job at progressing the story without revealing certain details, and that makes this story even richer and more accurate because it is being recounted by a child, and children tend to have very narrow perspectives. I thought the sentence, “Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden,” (p. 29) summarized this theme of vagueness that the author applied so well. I also believe that the depth and mysterious nature of the lake the narrators’ father would go diving in provided a very accurate mirror of the human mind, and perhaps even the fathers’ mind. When shock therapy was used as a scientific treatment for mental illness, we had only a superficial understanding of the human mind and how it worked. To this effect, when the narrator describes being underwater and how they could barely see a few feet ahead, they were just on the surface of all the things that could be discovered in the lake. The infinite amount of things to be discovered and explored in the lake was overwhelming for the narrator, but for his father it seemed to be an escape, a way for him to explain the unexplainable. Perhaps he thought that if he dove deep enough, he would find the solution to his illness among all the other hidden things.
Hannah:
This is lovely and incisive. I’m not sure about this assertion, though:
Overall, the author does a very efficient job at progressing the story without revealing certain details, and that makes this story even richer and more accurate because it is being recounted by a child, and children tend to have very narrow perspectives. I thought the sentence, “Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden,” (p. 29) summarized this theme of vagueness that the author applied so well.
Is this story “recounted by a child”? Would the narrator as a child have been able to formulate this precise, eloquent description of his feelings: “Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden.” It’s one of the wonderful complexities of perspective. Can we see and experience something without having the language for it? Clearly, the answer is yes, but what are the ways in which the ability to articulate experience shape that experience? Certainly, a great deal of this story is about experiences — mental illness, snake-handling, death — that are difficult to fully explain.