Arm Wrestling with My Father by Brad Manning and Shooting Father by Sarah Vowell - Essay Example

"Arm Wrestling With My Father" by Brad Manning and "Shooting Father" by Sarah Vowell: A Comparison of Realizations The parent/child connection is one of the strongest relationships humans experience. For this reason, it is often a subject of literary exploration. Authors everywhere have written about this relationship as a part of scientific study, as case analyses and as works of self-discovery among other reasons. In many cases, such as that expressed in short stories like “Arm Wrestling With My Father” by Brad Manning and “Shooting Father” by Sarah Vowell, the author seems to be working through personal issues they still struggle with relating to their parents. In these two tales, both authors depict the status of his/her parent/child connection during specific spatial periods and their perception of stepwise changes. They do this by expressing the difficulty they had in understanding the affection coming from each of their fathers respectively throughout their childhoods. Whereas these stories are similar in their subject matter, each author has different conditions regarding their connections with their dad and different ways of using description to depict their stories. After investigating each story, I believe Brad Manning’s “Arm Wrestling with My Dad” is stronger than Sarah Vowell’s “Shooting Dad” in terms of sharing with the readers a more intimate glimpse of the relationship between father and child. Brad Manning’s “Arm Wrestling with My Father” is about a father and child connection which provides a snapshot of the individual facets of the family unit, but also illustrates the dynamics of psychological consequences on the family. At the opening of the story, readers are confronted with the concept of a “predator and prey” position in which Manning’s father takes the role of the superior being. This view emerges after a game of arm wrestling waged between Manning and his father in which Manning, as narrator, loses in the end. When he says, “…I habitually had to misplace,” he is referring to the fact that he had not ever won a single match of arm wrestling against his father in his whole life. The imagery of Manning’s father being on top of him and wiping the essence of victory towards his son, who was lying on his back, proves that his father has a “superiority” mind-set as he was mocking on the “inferior”. In this article, readers could see that Manning engages in the custom of arm wrestling not because he enjoyed it as an activity with his father, but only engages in the sport to please his father. It is clear that his ultimate goal is to eventually be accepted by his dad and more fully, and more importantly, by himself. Becoming good at arm wrestling has become Manning’s definition of a strong and victorious man. Manning furthermore managed to set up the detail in such a way that the reader understands during the moment of arm wrestling father and son are bodily close, but emotionally they each strongly felt they were out of sync. In “Shooting Dad,” Sarah Vowell focuses more on the ideological differences she had with her father growing up. Even as a young child, she recalls instances when their beliefs clashed. Throughout the story, she neatly compartmentalizes these differences as a difference in the First Amendment of the Constitution versus the Second – the right to free speech and assembly as compared to the right to bear arms. Rather than simply living together, she illustrates how her house had specific zones for truce and specific zones in which one would not enter the territory of the other. She mentions her twin sister, Amy, as a means of contrasting the parent/child relationship she shared with her father with someone who had a temperament more in tune with their father’s interests. For her sister, clinging to the heroes and guns her father treasured were also means of feeling a connection with their dad. But over time both main characters come to get a better understanding for their father and how they express their love. The author illustrates how she has come to understand that her father’s love of guns is founded on a love of American history, family history and the thrill of the moment when the ammunition fires. This is all discovered as an attempt to get to know her father better when she is an adult and he is growing older. The experiment works in ways she doesn’t anticipate as she realizes that she is just like her father in her pursuit of strange equipment and the thrill of the noise that she can create with it. Examining both essays, it becomes clear that over time both Manning and Vowell arrive at a greater understanding of their fathers. In “Arm Wrestling with My Father,” Manning starts to understand his father better as he gets older. His father utilizes a different approach to demonstrate his love for his son. Instead of telling him how to advance his playing skills, the father eventually just gives his child a hug. In paragraph 13, Manning expresses this hug he has with his dad as being different than before, “Once our arms were wrapped round each other, though, I felt a different note. His adopt was softer, longer than before.” Even Vowell feels a tender, shielding instinct towards her father as she hears herself "instantly utter a judgment I not ever in my entire life thought I would say.” In these instants of realizing intimacy, Manning gains the foreshadowing of what he understands today, that he will have to be powerful enough to carry his fathers timber coffin to the serious, just as Vowell will have to honor her fathers last request. "I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill.” Her wars with her father are not physical as they were between Manning and his father and she is also given the ability to claim dictatorship over a small plot of family territory in the home, making her transformation somewhat less dynamic than that discovered by Manning. Both stories recount the various ways in which increasing maturity on the part of the child has led to a deeper relationship between the child and the adult parent. In both cases, this comes about as the child realizes that the father’s expressions of love are different from the blatant expressions they may have received from their mothers or come to expect through the idealistic visions of television sit-coms. Vowells recount is somewhat more playful and somewhat more egalitarian than Mannings. She states she will obey her father’s last, bizarre request for the disposal of his remains in spite of her hatred of the guns that her father has made a part of her life. Vowell, to the acrid end of her essay, retains her ambiguous relationship with firearms while still managing to find a point of connection with her father. This is very different from the close contact reached between Manning and his father. The last, physical war of Vowell and her dad will be waged after death, afresh in symbolism, like the placement of the family dwelling room. Manning’s story demonstrates how gradually, he starts to feel less competitive with his father as he becomes adept of illustrating his worth through other means, like excelling on written tests in college. When recognizing that ones dad is imperfect, and can be weak, even die, the adolescent gains a sense of maturity, and mortality. Manning wanted to be adept in talking to his father, else he would not use the dialect of conversation to describe the personal combat of dad and child, but because he could not, arm wrestling would have to suffice. His understanding that this was also the conclusion his dad had reached in attempting to find a means of bonding with his child only helps to deepen their relationship. Read More