Word: boye
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ownership becomes one of the most important concepts in the novel as it traces the course of the letter's dissemination. The letter becomes truly a letter left "to me," instead of "for me," as control over it passes from the protagonist's hands. When the book opens, the boy's mother has just handed the boy the letter, and immediately he is caught up in its contents and its history...
...reflections on the letter become the jumping off point for the liberal rush of free association that follows. We follow the boy's thought process as he tries to reconcile his views of his father with those of his friends and family. We sense his uncertainty when, suddenly, the letter passes out of his control, and is copied and sent to numerous relatives and friends of the family. Each of these has some comment to make on the letter that the boy feels was meant only for him. Uncertain how this development occurred, the boy watches passively, unhappy but somehow...
McElroy shows the boy's vacillations about the sending of the letter with credibility and sensitivity. Although the boy attempts to be understanding about his mother's and grandparents' decision to share the document, he is never certain what gives his family the right to examine and discuss this relic of his father's that he feeels was meant to speak directly...
...from the safe where it was first kept to the desk drawer where it was after his father's death. He says, "I did not see my mother actually find the letter. Come across it; locate it. I'm building backwards again." Toward the end of the novel, the boy has begun to assimilate his varying pictures of his father, but he is still fixated on the letter itself...
BRIGHTON Beach Memoirs is the first play in Neil Simon's trilogy of bittersweet autobiographical comedies with alliterative Bs in the titles. The play is about the early adolescence of a boy in an extended Jewish family in Depression-era Brooklyn...