Tiny, Smiling Daddy Essay -- Literary Analysis, Gaitskill

Gaitskill’s â€Å"Tiny, Smiling Daddy† focuses on the father and his downward spiral of feeling further disconnected with his family, especially his lesbian daughter, whose article on father-daughter relationships stands as the catalyst for the father’s realization that he’d wronged his daughter and destroyed their relationship. Carver’s â€Å"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love† focuses on Mel and his attempt to define, compare, and contrast romantic love, while leaving him drunk and confused as he was before. While both of my stories explore how afflicted love traumatizes the psyche and seem to agree that love poses the greatest dilemma in life, and at the same time that it’s the most valued prospect of life, the two stories differ in that frustrated familial love causes Gaitskill's protagonist to become understandable and consequently evokes sympathy from the reader, but on the other hand frustrated romantic love does nothin g for Carver's Protagonist, except keep him disconnected from his wife and leaving him unchanged, remaining static as a character and overall unlikable. In comparing â€Å"Tiny, Smiling Daddy† and â€Å"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love†, together they suggest that familial love is more important than romantic love, which we relentlessly strive to achieve often forgetting that we’ll forever feel alone without familial love, arguably the origin of love itself. â€Å"Tiny, Smiling Daddy† opens with â€Å"one of those pure, beautiful dreams in which he was young again, and filled with realization that the friends who had died, or gone away, or decided that they didn’t like him anymore, had really been there all along, loving him† (Gaitskill 305), and through this nostalgic state the father’s reaveled as a character who ha... ...e, because she’s too busy running around on some-† (Gaitskill 317) and these words show us how utterly â€Å"shitty† (Gaitskill 317) he feels, be it warranted or not. He’s faced with the reality that his wife and daughter are ‘leaving’ him behind, doing whatever necessary to detach themselves from his wretched stubbornness and consequently he’s left miserable and alone to mull over the bitter past and even more difficult present. He begins as a likeable character, but gradually becomes a self-righteous and hateful idiot. But, by the end the reader is left feeling extremely sympathetic for him. Though he’s in fact the bad guy, he gets us to view him as the bad guy whose evil is almost justified, or at least that it’s an inevitable symptom of his difficult childhood, poor marriage, extreme anxiety over what others think of him, and disapproval of his daughters lifestyle.