Style and Technique
Virtually all of Brodkey’s writing involves the extremely involved investigation of memories of his own life. Memories are excavated from the past with a precision and sensitivity that is indulged and then indulged further. In this story, as elsewhere, his style suggests a process of profound, persistent reflection and constant refinement of memory.
In order to suggest, for example, that the past occurrences, when recalled by the narrator, produce in him elaborate emotional responses, Brodkey moves repeatedly from past to present tense, blurring the distinction between what happened in the past and what happens as the narrator explores his love for his father.
Brodkey’s highly idiosyncratic, fragmented style expresses the way in which the act of remembering intensifies the past for the narrator and transports him to euphoria. Brodkey prevents this euphoria from appearing merely indulgent, nostalgic, facile, or incredible by underpinning it with more mundane elements. For example, at the end of the story, in a skillful touch of bathos, he writes that the luminousness that surrounds the narrator and his father has an effect like that of wearing a simple woolen cap—it is “very dimly sweaty; and it grew, it spread: this light turned into a knitted cap of light, fuzzy, warm, woven, itchy.”