Word: letters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another part of the boy is tempted to view the letter as do his friends and relatives. They see it as a work of art as well as proof of love, and toss out comments like, "'Your father wrote extremely well,'" or "'You couldn't have had a better father.'" But the son of the writer is not content with this interpretation. His father becomes "the writer of the letter" rather than "his father...
...continues to struggle to establish a consistent identity for his father, and seems to regret the fame that the letter has brought to him after death. He says, "I see that that is what I want this afternoon magnetized by the mail, detoured around class, food, new people, that he be a mere inhabitant of earth." In death, his father has become a symbol that transcends his son's memories...
...same time, however, the letter becomes a wall separating the boy from his mother. It is a gift that has been given him to unravel, and McElroy suggests that the boy cannot freely interact with others until he unravels the letter's past as well as its future...
...hero's words. The reader is drawn into the boy's mind, and follows his leaps from bemusement to reminiscence to stark realization of death's actuality. What began as an elegy for the father develops into a journal documenting the son's progression into maturity even as the letter progresses into wider and wider circles of society...
McElroy's achievement is to move beyond elegy, which is the conventiopnal stance of books about the death of loved ones. Just as the letter ends up by cerating a distance between the boy and his father, as written words are want to do, so too an elegaic novel would only add to that distance...