Paper Summary:

This paper compares the father figures in Dubus' two works. It explores their action and motivations for their actions and comes to highlight why fatherhood can be painful. It expands on the fathers' need to protect their children and discusses the moral and ethical outcome of their actions. The paper offers quotes from both texts to qualify points made.

From the Paper:

"The murderer Richard Strout gets out of jail on bond awaiting trial, and Matt's wife Ruth keeps seeing her son's killer around town ("...she sees him all the time, it makes her cry" (p. 65). Meanwhile, Matt "every day in his soul... shot Richard Strout in the face..." (p. 68). His motivation is thus two-fold, to protect his wife from having to see her son's killer face to face everyday, and to avenge the senseless death of his son, which he cannot escape from. "...Since it happened he had not been able to think about any of the small pleasures he believed he had earned, as he had earned also what was shattered now forever; the quietly harried and quietly pleasurable days of fatherhood" (p. 65). "

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