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Essay

Decent Essays

Joy Monica T. Sakaguchi

A Fortune

Many parents are neglecting their children, which marks them for life. The parents are carrying a huge responsibility for their children, and if the parents cannot live up to the following expectation, which comes with a kid, it will make them unsuitable as parents. This cannot only relate to the relationship between the narrator and his father, but the young boy and his father as well. They both suffer from the same privations and hunger after acknowledgement from their fathers.

The short story starts in medias res and is told through a male first-person narrator, which leads us to an understanding of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. The short story is written in past tense, and we only …show more content…

1, l. 15)

The fortune cookies have a major impact in the narrator’s life, and he has been collecting all the quotes from them. By reading the fortune cookies he perhaps tries to predict his own destiny, and has tried to find it in his failed relationship with his father. The same day he meets the boy Jeremy, he gets a reminder from his fortune cookie of the day, which says, “A change in your daily routine will lead you to treasure”. The narrator never used to steal on Sundays, but decides to break his routine when he noticed the boy Jeremy and his father. Jeremy and his father’s relationship can be seen as a reflection of the relationship between the narrator and his father. He recognizes the same feeling, when he sees the little boy’s desire to please his father, or to belong to someone.

The narrator shares the same destiny like Jeremy in spite of the difference in social status in society. Neither of the fathers is able to acknowledge or realize their son’s value. The narrator is confronted with Jeremy’s destiny, and indirectly confronted with his own destiny and relationship to his father. – “The wallet was still in my pocket. I pulled it out and tossed it in a garbage can instead of dropping it somewhere so it could be found and returned. That guy didn’t need his credit cards or cash or eelskin wallet. He didn’t know what a fortune he had anyway” (p. 4, l. 158) The narrator tries to give the boy what he has always

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