Short Story Analysis Paper: Reunion (Revised)

Think for a minute on how you would like to remember your first hero, no, not superman, your dad. How would you like to remember him? I’m pretty sure that the way you want to remember your father is nothing like the last meeting Charlie had with his dad. John Cheever blended humor, pathos and the grotesque together to paint a reunion between father and son. Cheever used all three of those literary devices to gives his writing meaning. When Cheever’s short story begins, we find that Charlie is pondering on the last time he saw his father. The first line of the entire story begins, “The last time I saw my father…” With that you can see the author’s evident use of pathos. This makes you feel sorry for Charlie’s misfortune. As the story develops Cheever keeps writing on the thoughts of Charlie’s last view of his dad.
By the middle of the story you begin to see the change in the way Charlie remembers his dad. his view of his father is no longer of admiration, but just a memory he would rather delete. “We sat down, and my father hailed the waiter in a loud voice…If it isn’t too much to ask of you—if it wouldn’t be too much above and beyond the call of duty…” The quote above shows how the author begins to use sarcasm as humor to portray how grotesque Charlie’s father really is. As the story keeps developing Charlie’s dad gets worse: “Kind sir, will you be good enough to favor me with one of your God-damned, no-good, ten-cent afternoon papers?” Charlie was close to leaving when the father said the quote above. The grotesque behavior, used as humor, the father took on was a building tool that was used cleverly by the author so that the last sentence of his story portrayed what his meaning was; “’Good bye daddy,’ I said, and I went down the stair and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.” The last line was clearly used pathos to affect the feelings of the reader.
So throughout the short story “Reunion” we see how John Cheever use the grotesque behavior of the father as humor, and then how both the grotesque and humor were cleverly put there so that Cheever could use pathos to add sentiment to the short story. He blended all three in the story so that the meaning was shown. ‘Always be an example for your child, because you never know how they will end up remembering you,’ that to me, seems to be the theme of John Cheever’s short story.