Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...theme of children dealing with a parent's death is timeless in literature, but in danger of being rendered trite through overuse. In The Letter Left to Me, Joseph McElroy avoids cliches by developing this theme in a unique and effective manner. The novel centers on letter from a father, written a few years before his death, to his teen-aged son. McElroy's choice of plot saves his novel from becoming another repetitive reflection on dealing with death...
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...
...journey 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...
...changes his way of adapting to death, McElroy shifts the tone of the novel. The first chapters are a monologue, mirroring the isolation and entrapment that the protagonist feels. Later, McElroy inserts dialogue into the text, a change that reflects the boy's attempts to adjust to his father's death and to the dissemination of the letter...
...reads it, and rereads it, searching for tidbits of love or caring, there are shreds of doubt in his mind. His memory betrays him, and his image of his father becomes confused with that of those around him. His fears are nearly realized at the end of the novel, when an acquaintance blankly tells him, "`It's not an affectionate letter...