It is a time for self-determination and defining the “values of life”. Even psychologists say that teenage years are the years for mistakes and learning from these mistakes. While it is evident that the mother-child relationship may be a little skewed, I also believe that the family has established their own means for showing affection and that the children’s aiding their mother in the end indicates that there is not necessarily a loss of respect despite her neglectful actions.Who can dare to say that he/she never did anything crazy or stupid in his/her teenage years? Well, I guess nobody.
I think what is most difficult about analyzing the relationships in this piece is that it is difficult to get past the humorous tone to really understand the seriousness of the events.
As the youngest child, I know all too well the tricks and pranks that are pulled. I too enjoyed the family dynamics highlighted in the piece. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that for me, it didn’t matter.
#Let it snow david sedaris series#
Especially in light of our last week’s conversations, I could not simply enjoy the bantering conversation between the characters, but was plagued by a slight skepticism as to the true series of events. Attempting to approach this story from a more academic perspective was therefore an interesting and somewhat challenging method. I read it then for the same purpose I read all his other work- for pleasure. While it seems they are protecting their mother from the snow and frostbite, perhaps they are instead protecting their family from ridicule as they try to save face.Īs an avid reader of David Sedaris, I first encountered this piece when it appeared in the New Yorker online. Whether the children are helping their ‘pitiful-looking’ (209) mother out of sympathy or embarrassment remains a mystery, although looking at their relationships, one is lead more towards embarrassment. While all six members of the family are at odds, when it comes to protecting their family’s absurdities, they come together (minus the absent father). Even the children are against each other as they try to convince one another to accept a kamikaze mission in order to save the others. On a third note, the father seems unresponsive to them and avoids both the snow days and his wife’s mundane life in order to continue on with his own everyday life. While the children cherish their breaks from their everyday mundane lives by way of their lengthy snow days, the mother loves her mundane, ‘secret’ life and despises the snow days. I find the adult versus child dynamics in Sedaris’ story interesting. I wonder if from writing this story and not including himself in the aid of his mother in the last part, the narrator depicts that maybe he didn’t find it “hard to stay angry at someone that pitiful-looking” (Sedaris 209). I think it is also particularly interesting that in that final paragraph where the narrator wraps up how they pitched in to help their mother back in the house, that he says nothing about his actions when they return to the house together. This ending leaves readers with the same murky understanding of the events that occurred as the children and are forced to accept that “this was how things went” for them (Sedaris 210). The narrator, clearly older and reflecting on this week of snow, makes a note of the peculiarity of the compassion and resistance to bitterness of young hearts which I prefer rather than ending with an explanation behind what happened. Her pulling the drapes in response depicts her both as more of a child, hiding from what she does not want to think about, and as an adult who is disinterested in the empty threats of her children and their distant father. This just appears to be something a mother would say to her children if they locked her outside (Sedaris 208). I enjoyed what seemed like a reversal of roles when the siblings return from playing in the snow and they tell the mother that she is “going to be in so much trouble when Dad gets home” for locking them out. There is something very methodical and almost unusually typical about the dysfunction of the family in David Sedaris’s “Let It Snow ” like the children understand that things are awry but because they are children they lack the capacity explain what’s going on in their house.
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