Joy Monica T. Sakaguchi

A Fortune

Many parents are neglecting their children, which marks them for life. The parents are carrying a huge responsibility for their children, and if the parents cannot live up to the following expectation, which comes with a kid, it will make them unsuitable as parents. This cannot only relate to the relationship between the narrator and his father, but the young boy and his father as well. They both suffer from the same privations and hunger after acknowledgement from their fathers.

The short story starts in medias res and is told through a male first-person narrator, which leads us to an understanding of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. The short story is written in past tense, and we only need to read the first sentence in the story, to figure out that the narrator also is the main character. We do not know the name of the narrator, and therefore he remains unknown, which creates anonymity. Through several flashbacks we get an insight into the narrators childhood, and we get to understand his personality, position and social status in the society. The narrator belongs to a lower social group in society, and we get that impression, because of the use of slang and everyday language. This finds expression in sentences like:
“My ma tried to raise me well” (p. 1, l. 15) The narrator uses slang, instead of writing, “mother”, as we would have preferred. Also, we have another expression like:
“Hey, kid, you lost?” (p. 2, l. 78) The verb “are” in this sentence, which comes from “to-be”, is omitted.

The father of the narrator teaches him pick pocketing in the age of five, which means that the family did not have a lot of money. Growing up in a trailer park is one of the reasons why it has gone that far. The only way the narrator is able to relate to his father is through this pick pocketing. It is also the only way he