The different between the two families depicted in Flight & your shoes Essay Example for Free

The different between the two families depicted in Flight your shoes Essay The story Flight is about an old man trying to come to terms with his granddaughter growing up. It is form a collection of short stories. The scene is set and the mood of all the characters are established right at beginning of the story. The old man has some pigeons, which he keep as pets. Flight is based around the similarity between the way the old man looks after his pigeons, and how he would like his granddaughters to be controlled and trained the same way. The pigeons are symbols representing his granddaughters. We see, however, that the birds return home. Whether his granddaughters will is another matter. There is a contrast when you look at the syntax in Your Shoes.Which is different from Flight. Here, we have a first person narrative, and because a character is speaking to us, we have the rhythms of speech, changes of direction in the flow of sentences and short, broken speech.This not the cone in Flight which is third person narrative and less personal. Structuarally, the story is very clever. We gradually learn about the woman speaking. At first, we sympathise with her; then learn how she has been horrible to her daughter; how she has tried to control her and keep her unspoilt like the shoes; how she has made the decisions for her; and how, just as she did not get on with her mother, so too this mother-daughter relationship has also collapsed. We are convinced, from the words coming from the womans own mouth, that the failings are her fault. And we move to a final scene in which she is pathetic and sad, locked away from the husband she never loved, pretending love for her daughter and the pair of shoes which symbolises how she would like her daughter to be. Flight is all about growing up and leaving home to starting a new life. For the mother, in this story,Flight this is a natural process, it seems, and she is happy to see her daughters fall in love and marry. The mother is crying,, however because of her father s attitude her father has made all the girls so unhappy by wanting them to be like his birds. Or might it be that she somehow sees his point and is wishing that life could be as simple as he would like it to be that she knows everything might be easier if we could simply return to the coop? Or is she crying for him, because he is so sad and so unfair and wrong? It is up to us to decide! The old man has lost three other granddaughters through marriage. He saw them transformed inside a few months from charming petulant spoiled children into serious young matrons. He is scared of what marriage will do to Alice. When he loses Alice through marriage, he thinks that everything will be gone there will be no more granddaughters at home for him to cherish and he is worried that the girl he loves will change as her sisters did. He is scared of being lonely. He would be left, uncherished and alone, with that square-fronted, calm-eyed woman, his daughter. Therefore, when Alice leaves, he feels that his whole life will be ruined. When he releases his favourite bird (which we can link to Alice), all the other birds go too, because Alice was the one person he had left to love. If she goes, all his capacity to love goes. The mans life will be entirely different with the loss of all his granddaughters it will be entirely different with the loss of all his birds. When he says farewell to one favourite, everything else crumbles for him too. Ending he is now aware, at least that he is how he perceives things. However after releasing the pigeon he turned slowly, taking his time; he lifted his eyes to smile proudly down the garden at his granddaughter. She was starting at him. She did not smile. She was wide-eyed, and pale in the cold shadow, and he saw the tears run shivering of her face. The daughter was still with him.