Arm Wrestling With My Father Rhetorical Analysis

While reading, Shooting Dad, I have notice that Vowell uses multiple hyperboles to develop a humorous tone. She included a hyperbole like,'' shooting crows is a national pastime, like baseball and apple pie,'' because it demonstrates a sense of exaggeration stating , in a playful tone, that many people shot crows just to waste time. Vowell also exaggerates about her home being compared to a Civil War by explain that, by looking at her home, you can already see "the Democratic campaign poster in the upstairs window and the Republican one in the downstairs window." This expresses the text in a humorous yet ironic tone which capture readers attention to continue forward and have a sense of completion.

Arm Wrestling with My Father Change is inevitable, and often leads to emotional repercussions. Brad Manning expresses this idea in his coming-to-age essay “Arm Wrestling with My Father,” in which he traces the evolution of his relationship with his father. Using rhetorical devices such as repetition, selection of detail and analogy, Manning further proves his ambivalence towards his and his father’s impending roles reversals. Manning begins the essay by describing a regular arm wrestling match with his father, and uses repetition while describing the match “…is what he always said…he would always control the outcome… Dad would always win; I always had to lose” (156).

The relationship between the two fathers and the two sons is a very important theme in this book. Because of their different backgrounds, Reb Saunders and David Malters approached raising a child from two totally different perspectives.

Everyone has a father. No matter if the father is present in a child’s life or not, he still exists and takes that role. A father has a major impact on his child whether he knows it or not, and that impact and example shapes the child’s perspective on life, and on love. The authors, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, share the impact of their fathers through poetry, each with their own take on how their fathers treated them. The poems “Forgiving My Father” and “Those Winter Sundays” have significant differences in the speaker’s childhood experiences, the tone of the works, and the imagery presented, which all relate to the different themes of each poem.

Sarah Vowell’s “Shooting Dad” discusses the relationship between a daughter and father. Engaged in a lifelong opposition to her father’s politics, interests, and his work, Vowell discovers just how much she actually has in common with him. Throughout her adolescent years, she was her father’s polar opposite. Her room was littered with musical instruments, albums, and Democratic campaign posters while her father’s, an avid gunsmith, was strewn with metal shavings and Republican party posters. Amongst all this conflict, Vowell found that they had more in common with each other than either of them realized. As she looks back on her childhood, Vowell explains that although it may take a while to see and understand others’ perspectives, once you

While George and I share same social aspects we also share some personal aspects with each other. Like George, I was left without a father figure in my life. George’s father and my father left around the same time in our lives, which I find particularly interesting. Our fathers left when we were between the ages of seven and ten years old. As our fathers left we were looked at as the “man of the house” in our household. This might seem like a big responsibility for young boys our age but, we established ways to make a positive result for ourselves and those affected by the situation.

Although single parenthood is on the rise in homes today, children still often have a father role in their life. It does not matter who the part is filled by: a father, uncle, older brother, grandfather, etc...; in almost all cases, those relationships between the father (figure) and child have lasting impacts on the youth the rest of their lives. In “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” Jimmy Carter tells the audience no matter the situation with a father, hold onto every moment.

What would be a better expression of father’s love? Squeezing each other’s fists till strips of tendons bulge out? Or wrapping arms around each other for a warm embrace? In “Arm Wrestling with My Father,” Brad Manning experiences a change in his father’s expression of love; from arm wrestling, to a hug. In his story, Manning successfully depicts a boy who admired his father’s masculine strength and grows up to also respect his tenderness and gradually learns to replace his father’s role. His depiction is displayed through alternative comparison, sentence length, analogy, and diction.

In their recent work, Brad Manning and Sarah Vowell have written about more than one way to have a close, but different relationship with their fathers. There is has always been a belief that to get along with someone you would have normal conversations, enjoy each other’s company, or share a common interest. In the story they love their father as any other child would, but their ways of communication are not the same and are different from a common father-child relationship. Both authors use rhetorical devices as a framework for differentiating their relationships with their fathers by characterizing them.

Both “Arm Wrestling with My Father” and “Shooting Dad” written by Brad Manning and Sarah Vowell, respectively, portrays a damaged and rough relationship that a son and/or daughter holds with his father. Although they both find themselves struggling, they are dealing with different things, Manning is dealing with a physical bounding, while Vowell finds herself handling a more emotional and communicative type of bonding. Eventually, both characters find themselves in a mature relationship over time. The characters had similarities and also differences with their respective father. Throughout the stories, both authors dig into the relationship between child and father and how it can be shaped and changed over time.

Few relationships are as deep as those between child and parent. While circumstance and biology can shape the exact nature of the bond, a child’s caretaker is the first to introduce them to the world. And as they grow and begin to branch out, children look to their parents as a model for how to interact with the various new situations. Through allusion, potent imagery, and nostalgic diction, Natasha Trethewey constructs an idolized image of a father guiding their child through life’s challenges only to convey the speaker’s despair when they are faced with their father’s mortality in “Mythmaker.”

In “Arm Wrestling with My Father,” Brad Manning writes about the relationships he has had with his father. He shares how they’re relationship has changed throughout his life once he came to a realization. In “Shooting Dad,” Sarah Vowell also writes about her relationship with her father and the differences in opinion between the two of them. Both authors end their essays by coming to a realization about their fathers. Although both authors have similar experiences with their fathers, they come to different realizations.

A father and son relationship is very important. It is the foundation for boys to become men. The article, “Why the Father Wound Matter: Consequences for Male Mental Health and the Father-Son Relationship”, by Eric D. Miller explains the concept of a father wound that can manifest in males due to a father neglecting or abusing them. Miller stresses that by becoming fathers’, men can overcome father wounds. He touches upon the idea of masculinity, and how it can be a factor to why there is sometimes a distant relationship between a father and a son. The “A Father’s Call: Father-Son Relationship Survival of Critical Life Transitions”, by Ivory Achebe Toldson and Ivory Lee Toldson explains the relationship between a father and a son from adolescent into adulthood. Lee who was the father describes his struggles through a divorce and how he stayed connected to his son no matter what occurred. Lee’s son Achehbe is also featured in the article and expresses the rough childhood he went through without his father being directly in his life. Together these two articles show that a father is essential to the raising of a boy because without one many form father wounds along with emotional problems.

There’s nothing more like it than a father and son relationship. Although it’s a different type of bond of friendship that you can ever have with anyone else; that helps you shape into the person that you are or becoming to be and you’ll never have to look up to anyone else but him. Although they’re some poor father and son relationships in our society that can affect anyone’s emotional heath, which can lead onto a major lead factor into their growth throughout the teenage years and so on. One of my favorite singers of all time is Demi Lovato, whom has experienced a poorly daughter and father relationship with her own father, in which she demonstrates it in her songwriting skills such as song as “Father” and “For the love of the daughter, in which she’s able to express herself throughout her music and her pitfalls of a rocky relationship with her father, who wasn’t the perfect father figure for her as she expected it to be. In the two short stories “Reunion” and “Powder” written by John Cheever and Tobias Wolff demonstrates the unique bonding between a father and son’s relationship, point of view and conflict to covey to the readers that every son and father’s relationship it’s like any unoriginal father and son relationship among with its pitfalls and ever lasting memories.

After reading Gutmann, Bly, Kindlon and Thompson I remembered a couple movies that I had watched in the past. Fight club and Regeneration, I believe, both coincide with the readings. Both made me think about how parenting and fathering plays a part in a male’s masculinity. It is very clear that our society has created a sense of separation for a generation of men who feel like boys that are lost, and unsure about what it really means to be a man. Most of these men have been lacking a parental father figure in their life. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Pat Barker’s Regeneration provides an examination of men growing up without fathers and the lifelong effects it has on men, including the effects of their sense of masculinity. Fight Club and Regeneration are a warning of what happens in a society when there is no father archetype upon men can look up to. In an interview with the author, Palahniuk, stated that he meant the story to be a cautionary tale of what can occur when an entire segment of a culture is disenfranchised. He explains why he was moved to write the book: “I wanted to acknowledge what my friends were complaining about, being failed by their fathers, and document what’s going on in our lives.” (Singleton, 143) Regeneration and Fight Club are both about the men lacking a parental father figure and how it affects their life. From this analysis, it is apparent that these men feel alienated, emasculated, and are looking for guidance by partaking in homosexual or