The Child is the Father of the Man (or Woman)
Competition and compassion, contrasting Brad Manning's "Arm Wrestling with My Father" and Sarah Vowell's "Shooting Dad" Learning to regard a parent as a human being, not just as a father or mother, is one of the most formative emotional developments in an adolescent's life. Both Brad Manning's "Arm Wrestling with My Father" and Sarah Vowell's "Shooting Dad" deals with the authors' relationships with difficult, patriarchal, male authority figures. Their conflicts with their fathers are waged through violence; physical in Manning's case, and emotional in Vowell's case. And paradoxically the eventual compassion the writers are able to show towards their parent is also extracted through violence. The authors of both essays have almost warlike and combative relationships with their fathers. This is expressed with military language, in the case of Manning, that of arm wrestling and other athletic activities. "To get down on the floor and grapple, arm against arm was like having a conversation" (Manning 127). For Manning, developing a full relationship with his father was difficult. Unlike his son, Manning's father was a man of few words, a man who preferred to 'do' rather than to speak. Arm wrestling, not through writing or speaki
Even Vowell feels tender, protective instincts towards her father as she hears herself "instantly utter a sentence I never in my entire life though I would say. In that moment, Manning gains the foreshadowing of what he knows today, that he will have to be strong enough to carry his father's wood coffin to the grave, just as Vowell will have to honor her father's last request. "I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill. Her wars with her father are not physical, and also she has a dictatorship of at least a small, equal plot of land in her home. Vowell's description is slightly more playful and slightly more egalitarian than Manning's. She says she will comply with his final, bizarre request for the disposal of his remains. Vowell, to the bitter end of her essay, retains her ambiguous relationship with firearms. Unlike the close contact of Manning and his father, the final, physical war of Vowell and her dad will waged after death, again in symbolism, like the arrangement of the family living room. Slowly, he begins to feel less competitive with his father, as he becomes capable of demonstrating his worth through other means, like excelling on exams in college. When realizing that one's father is imperfect, and can be weak, even die, the adolescent gains a sense of maturity, and mortality. Manning wanted to be able to talk to his father, otherwise he would not use the language of conversation to describe the physical combat of father and son, but because he could not, so arm wrestling instead would have to suffice. we were incapable of having a conversation that didn't end in an argument. Manning can pity his father, because he has the power to extend or withdraw pity.
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Acceptance Essays
