Family Portrayal in Mason and Haruf's Stories

Thus, surface-to-air missile is not and part of a fragmented family but likewise in the midst of an unsettled life that does not appear to be heading toward an outcome that will result in a cohesive family unit for her, either within her existing family or in her future marriage.

Plainsong is similar to In demesne with respect to the fragmented families and disenfranchised people, but it differs in that it is not just a portrait of one family trying to fix itself together into a unit but rather a hodgepodge of families within one community. Guthrie and his young sons Ike and Bobby have to supervise with their wife/mother's depression and abandonment, so their family is broken, although high school charge counselor Maggie Jones is in love with Guthrie and may become a way for the family to be a unit again. Victoria Robideaux is the close disenfranchised member of the community. She is a pregnant teen who has been cast out by her boyfriend and evicted from her mother's home; she is not only labored to find a way to support herself but also detached from all of the family and close personal attachments she had.

In both(prenominal) stories, crises occur that stress the families even further. In In Country, for example, Emmett fails to move over home one night aft(prenominal) a bounce and Sam's mother Irene shows up three days later with Emmett in tow; he had gotten drunk and gone to visit her after the dance. Irene's visit is pivotal for Sam, who takes the opportunity to ask Irene to tell h

Haruf, Kent. Plainsong. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

er more about her father, Dwayne.

Irene alerts her to the presence of letters from Dwayne, and Sam finds and reads the letters, but they atomic number 18 no help. In her restlessness, she visits her grandparents, who let her read Dwayne's diary. In it, Sam discovers that her father has killed people and finds that she cannot get her mind around what happened in Vietnam. To attempt to gain a sense of what Emmett and Dwayne went through there, she goes campground at Cawood Pond, pretending to be in Vietnam with them and seeing Vietnamese in her mind's eye. However, Emmett becomes worried about her, thinking she might be dead, and finds her at the pond. The two of them talk, and Emmett recalls an incident from Vietnam that brings him to the point of sobbing. The story culminates with Sam, Emmett, and the gran visiting the Vietnam Memorial, where Sam has an epiphany about the killing and devastation of war.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

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