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Fusilli

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Fusilli
No parent should live to see their son or daughter die. However, in times of war and strife, young men and women, sons and daughters, sometimes have to pay the heaviest price and sacrifice their lives to protect others. The short story explores the anger and grief that the loss of a son creates and how it can devastate a family.
The text begins in medias res. Because of this, we do not have a backdrop of information to work with when we read the text. The text centres on a nameless narrator through whose confused and disconnected thoughts we slowly learn more and more about his situation and the reason for his unexplained anger. Because of the lack of the characterisation in the short story, we have to analyse his …show more content…

In the narrator’s case, the loss of his son has been so detrimental to his mental wellbeing that he has begun to blame himself based on the superstition that his picking up the phone somehow set off a chain of events that led to his son’s losing his life. This is seen again in lines 81 and 82, where he attempts to find a reason for his son’s death by making himself a scapegoat. The other part of his inner conflict is how he feels torn. On the one hand, as seen in lines 78 and
79, he wants to let go of Doug and move on with his life. It is for the same reason that he avoids the aisle where he received the last call from Doug and refuses to eat Fusilli pasta. On the other hand, he does not want to forget about him and because of this he continues to grieve and reminisce about their shared memories. This is seen towards the end of the story, when he buys a packet of Fusilli despite of the fact that he initially entirely avoided entering the pasta aisle. He wants to keep the packet as a memento, and in a way, the Fusilli becomes a symbol of the memory of his late son. “He felt the pieces of pasta beneath the shiny plastic like the knobbly, guessed-at things inside a Christmas stocking long ago.” The words long ago are especially important because they denote that Christmas is a thing of the past. With Christmas as a symbol of happiness of family, the end of Christmas marks the end of the things that the symbol

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