First-Person Fiction

In his short story “Communist,” Richard Ford writes about Les, a 16-year-old boy who is hard to pin down as a character. He seems unsure and hesitant, but also doesn’t seem to question anything asked of him. This is intentional, of course, as Ford has written an excellent depiction of any 16-year-old, someone who is not entirely their own person. Les is caught in the middle of opposing forces, often opting to just do as he is told.

Throughout the story, Les is caught in the middle between his mother Aileen and the men she dates (his father and Glen). Although he never willingly enters the conflict, he is witness to all of it, and it affects him. Telling his mother that he wants to go hunting with Glen (Ford  217) wedges him right into the existing battle of power between Glen and Aileen. This is a conflict he never fully understands, but it nonetheless affects his relationship with both his mother and Glen. He feels distant from his mother and, despite seeing her reactions to mistreatment, never quite understands her.

To tell the truth, I didn’t know why she was so mad at him. I would’ve thought she’d be glad to see him. But she suddenly seemed to hate everything about him.

Les never really describes how he’s feeling throughout the short story, usually only what he witnesses. So all the arguments and conflict don’t seem to affect him — until, that is, he blows up at Glen. He says:

Though it is true that I wanted to hit him, hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop.

This outburst comes as such a surprise because of Les’s previous lack of emotion. But this feels very representative of teenagers, especially teenage boys; they bottle up all their emotions and refuse to acknowledge them until they surface as rage or violence.

But what else contributes to this outburst besides being surrounded by conflict? Les is constantly influenced by everyone around him. He doesn’t really seem to get opinions of his own. The authority figures in his life, his mom and Glen, make all the decisions. Aileen tries to keep him from going on the trip altogether and makes him agree to go to college. Glen pretty much ignores him, only asking him one question about himself during their hunting trip, and Glen then makes it all about himself.

In the end, this story is about a quiet boy who is pushed around by Glen and Aileen and who then has a breaking point. But readers also come to understand that although he admittedly doesn’t understand his mother, and has not talked to her in many years, he is fiercely protective of her, almost to the point of violence.

“Optimists” follows along behind Frank and his interactions with life after experiencing traumatic events. His father had killed Boyd right in front of him from anger and spite after having watched another man die. It is truly interesting to watch this story unfold because it seems to inhabit the meaning of being an optimist.

Frank continued living on with his life after that night destroyed his family and distanced him from them for 15 years. There was the constant struggle for him on having moved on so quickly that he forgot about the times before his life stopped being normal. Ford was able to create an extremely dynamic character who adapted to changes in a very optimistic way, yet Ford also creates in this same character an internal turmoil. It takes Frank years to finally realize how much of a toll that night has taken on him, but when he finally does, it seems to stabilize his life. He is able to open up and take things how they come.

It is impressive to see how Ford unfolds his stories to develop such a diverse character base and storylines. He fills spaces with fitting dialogue and a solid base of information for the reader to picture each scene and character. Within all of Ford’s stories, he never seems to waste his space; even though there are no restraints for his writing, the story always fills the space that it belongs in, and I find that immeasurably impressive.

The story “Optimists” is interesting because unlike many of the other narrators in this book, Frank seemed aware of the lasting effect the events of the story had on his life, citing it as “the year, in other words, when my life changed for all of us and forever.” (Ford 171). Frank acknowledges this before the story begins, and the life-altering effects of this are a theme throughout the story.  Frank seems to believe his father killing Boyd was the beginning of the end for his family. This one action ruined Frank’s relationship with his parents as well as driving him to join the military. However, despite Frank acknowledging this, his recollection of the event is tempered with uncertainty regarding the events. We see this when Frank is looking at Boyd. “I think he was dead then,” he says. “I think even Penny Mitchell knew he was dead.” (Frank 180) In this event, we see  uncertainty surrounding the moment of Boyd’s death, adding complication to an already complex situation. By not knowing the exact moment of Boyd’s death, Frank is left with unknown variables surrounding a traumatizing event. These unknown variables make it harder for him to overcome the trauma associated with the event. This trauma could be what caused Frank to leave his life behind, unable to deal with the complications associated with it.

Alongside this we also see Frank struggling with the memory of what life used to be like before his father went to jail. “I now no longer remember the exact year of my father’s birth, or how old he was when I last saw him, or even when the last time took place. When you’re young, these things seem unforgettable and at the heart of everything. But they slide away and are gone when you are not so young.” (Ford 187) This is Frank grappling with the complicated issues regarding his memory. He mourns the lost opportunity of the life he could have had, yet he slowly is losing the ability to recall what it was like. So now he is not only mourning what could have been but the memory of it.

The title of the story “Communist” refers to the boyfriend of the main character’s mother, Glen Baxter. Glen identifies as a Communist and had been to Vietnam. In the story when he and the main character, Les, go hiking to the lake where they are going to hunt geese, he mentions that there are people who want to kill him for being a Communist. “There are people who want to kill me right now,” he says, “and I would kill a man myself if I thought I had to.” (Ford 222) He keeps a pistol on him at all times because he is paranoid that someone is going to try and kill him when he least suspects it. Towards the end of the story, we see some of his fear show through when he gives Les the pistol and says “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to shoot me? Nobody thinks they’ll die. But I’m ready for it right now.” ( Ford 232) As much as the main character wants to hurt him, he cannot after seeing how scared Glen is.

As for Les, he is a conflicting character. He has lost his dad, and his mom is mostly absent, going out drinking and hanging out with other men. He admits he likes Glen at the beginning of the story, going so far as to say that he wishes Glen was around more often than his mom at nighttime (Ford 217). Even when his mother tells Glenn that Les isn’t interested in going hunting, Les agrees to go. In a way, Les sees Glen as another father figure that he can look up to in his life. However, at the end of the hunt when Glen is afraid of what he has done after shooting the goose in the lake multiple times and refusing to go get it, Les’s perspective changes. We discover towards the end of the story that Les only liked Glen because he was what he wanted, a father figure who was tough and strong like his father once was. This is reaffirmed on pages 234 and 235 when his mother asks if she is still very feminine. Les replies that he thinks she still is. However, he cannot remember what his mom had said because the event happened such a long time ago.

Les wanted to tell this story even though his memories were foggy because it was the time he realized how fragile the world was and how a man like Glen Baxter could easily be broken by the world, internally or externally.

I noticed a great deal of similarities between the last two stories from Richard Ford that we were assigned, “Optimists” and “Communist.” Throughout Richard Ford’s collection of short stories, he writes extensively about the relationships between children and their parents, and explores many different variations of parenthood and childhood in this manner. He especially seems to focus on the division that can occur between families, parents, and children, and the effect this has on all parties involved. In these two stories in particular, the narrator is a young boy who was around fifteen or sixteen years old when these stories took place, and neither of them had a father figure that was very prevalent in their lives. Both narrators are also telling these stories as adults in their 40’s, and both of them also appear to narrate these stories as though they are still the children they once were when these events were happening. Although there is a slight difference in their situation, with Frank having his father present and Les having his moms’ boyfriend instead of his biological father, overall their lives are not too different from each other. Both of these young boys have a very detached relationship with their mothers, which I thought provided an interesting point of discussion. The lack of familial connection due to both of these stories involving a parent that was absent or taken away resulted in a lack of understanding in the narrators, and a general detachment from anyone around them. In “Communist,” Les states, “And though I didn’t know why, it occurred to me that Glen Baxter and I would not be friends when all was said and done, since I didn’t care if he ever married my mother or didn’t” (pg. 236). Both Frank and Leslie talk about how they do not care at all about what happens within their families, and they are also apathetic when dangerous or potentially life-threatening events occur in their lives as well. In “Optimists,” Frank and his mother sit in a room with a dead body for a long amount of time, and even in his narration of these events currently he still portrays the situation in a detached and stoic manner, as though his father killing someone was not actually important or relevant to his life at all.

It is very anticlimactic in contrast to how Frank begins the story by saying that “The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever- ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life” (pg. 181). I believe that there is a theme of immaturity in Richard Fords’ writings and how his characters view the world and themselves. The lack of empathy for their families, the contentment with not understanding what was going on in their lives and the unwillingness to recognize the harm that such events brought onto them as young children demonstrates that these narrators have not changed despite how many years have passed since these occurrences. Overall, these two pieces may have different characters and storylines, but in actuality they are more alike than they are different.

In this story, what stands out the most to me is the lingering undertone of regret. The irony of the title being “Optimists” and yet that being one of the biggest themes in the story wasn’t lost on me, but it came up time and time again. It’s insinuated that the narrator’s (Frank’s) mother, Dorothy, regretted her quiet life based on how she interacted with Boyd and Penny. The mention about how she would only usually play her game with them specifically on nights when her husband, Roy, was away I thought seemed like a pretty decent hint at that. There was also the mention that Roy hadn’t been on the job long enough to gain seniority and security in his job, which he undoubtedly regretted seeing as though he was the breadwinner of the family.

The titular night where not only one man, but two, were killed brought more irony to the title. On p. 173, Frank said: “He was an optimist. Both of them were optimists, I think.” Knowing how both of them acted, I think that it was less that they were optimistic but rather that they never allowed themselves to think that the worst could happen. So, whenever the November night happened, and the worst possible case scenario really did happen Frank saw the amount of bitterness and regret that both of his parents really had. His father obviously regretted not being able to save his coworker, but he also regretted losing his temper and accidently murdering Boyd. Roy threw out the idea that Dorothy was possibly having an affair, which given Boyd’s reaction to the whole situation, how he purposefully seemed to be trying to set him off, and the whole fishiness of the situation I do think that’s a plausible theory; if it was true then Dorothy would certainly have remorse for her part to play in the matter as well.

Then, there’s Frank, and though he was a bystander to the whole fiasco, I think that was the point of it. He was a teenager, not equipped to handle seeing so many awful things in such a short time, and he ran from it. He said on the first page of the story (171) that “I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back.” That didn’t sound like someone who was proud of his actions, and while they’re completely understandable it came off to me like he wished that he could have done something more. Much like how resigned his parents were that night, whenever he later ran into his mother at the grocery store he came off as apathetic to the meeting. Like this was simply how the deck played out, and while he wasn’t happy with it there wasn’t much of a way to change it. If his parents qualified as this warped definition of “optimistic,” then Frank would certainly fall under that camp as well.

In Richard Ford’s “Optimists” the narrator decided, after seeing and speaking to his mother for the first time in years, to tell the story of how life changed suddenly for him. The narrator, Frank, told his story when he was 43 years old, looking back to when he had been sixteen. I believe Frank told this story by means of speaking or writing with some form of an audience; he uses “you,” which led me to believe there is an audience, as in on page 188 where he says, “And when you are the age I was then…”

The narrator was looking back on the events that happened with more realizations than what he would have had at the time. He looked back and realized things about the situation and the people, like when he thought his dad had been a bit of gambler despite stating, “though I did not even know what it meant to be a gambler then.” (Ford 183) This, I find, really defines how much this man has learned over the years after the event. There was a strong sense of maturity and a desire to understand despite he knew it may not be the best to know. The ending was where we learned where he stood at this point in time — 43 years old — though the beginning clearly states that this is a story that happened a long time ago. I want to say that the narrator thinks this is a story about his family being torn apart, but I feel like he realizes it’s about him and the toll it took on him. Even though he’d been young and understood then that the family fell apart, he was looking back on it as if he’s realized something greater. I gather that the narrator, while still learning things at this point in his life, is very close to realizing that he learned to fear his father. A man, he saw, “made mistakes,” and who, “could hurt people,” and he dived deeper into it as he noticed that his father ruined his life, his son’s life, his wife’s life, and there is no turning back.

At a point, I think he realized he didn’t understand his father and what could make him snap so easily, but it’s also likely he understood as a child that his father hadn’t been doing well in the first place–his father had seen a man die earlier that day anyway. At the time he felt really lost, confused, and alone, and he could only guess what his mother had been feeling. I think this story was a bit of a reflection; as he thought back to the events that took place, he was looking at it with a new perspective. He’s been a husband, a son, and a soldier, and I think he  learned that it’s easy to break when times get hard — but he can’t, for some reason, forgive his father, who had completely vanished. His tone, to me, sounded soft, reflective, and maybe even inquisitive. He was soft about his family, thinking about them still in good light — as good as possible — and reflective as he thought about how things could have gone differently; then there was his curiosity about why it all happened the way it had. I don’t think the narrator changed as he told the story, but he certainly changed in the story from a clueless child to a man who had a little more knowledge and reflection about things that could and can happen. I think the narrator found telling the story meaningful as if to give himself a breath of relief — reminding him it’s over — or that it is a call to his family; he missed them but understands why these things happened.

“Winterkill” is an interesting story that follows two friends, Les and Troy, and a woman named Nola. Ford was able to create a diverse setting within the twenty-two pages that create the story. Once again the reader finds themselves somewhere within Montana with the reference to Deer Lodge, where the state prison is located. It is interesting to see how Ford is able to connect the stories within this book in such a way that it feels as if every character knows one another in some way. Within “Winterkill” there is a brotherly bond between Les and Troy that seems to exist because the two of them do not really have anyone else. Nola is a character that gives them both a temporary purpose. Les passes time with her and Troy looks for happiness with her. Ford does a decent job at developing the characters and creating emotions, descriptions, and thoughts that the reader can pick up on.