Family Dynamics to the Extreme

 

Lately, the more and more I read about families and family dynamics in literature, the more I’m tempted to consider my family dynamic, despite the fact that the families I’ve been reading about recently in “Teenage Wasteland” and “Fiesta” are so extremely disparate from mine.

In Friday’s discussion about “Teenage Wasteland,” we briefly mentioned the intricacy of the family relationships in the short story, and how each member of the Coble family is portrayed in that aspect. I was actually pleased to find that my fellow classmates observed and distinguished almost exactly the same explanation my group did for each character’s role in the short story. It was kind of unexpected (in a good way) to see the majority of the students in my class pensively examining and questioning the main characters, Daisy, Donny, and Cal, and their perceived objective/purpose in the short story. Especially since Daisy’s character is so crucial to the story’s progression and essential in its heightening plot. Plus, many seemed to discern Cal’s seemingly malicious and sinister character that distinctly possesses very questionable incentives and intents for Donny in the story. Fortunately, practically everyone detected vile Cal’s disconcerting and obscure role in the story as far as his particularly uncanny smile that strikes Donny’s mom Daisy as “feverish and avid—a smile of hunger,” accentuating Cal’s devious, peculiar, and parasite-like nature (106).

All in all, I was able to grasp a better understanding of the closing paragraph of the short story, which is arguably of the utmost significance, when we carefully went over it as a collective group and logically substantiated and concluded that Donny’s disappearance left a permanent and lasting impact on the family, especially Daisy, as she visualizes a basketball that “flies up, sinks through the hoop, descends, lands in a yard littered with last year’s leaves and striped with bars of sunlight as white as bones, bleached and parched and cleanly picked,” signifying Donny’s battle and conflict throughout the story through the basketball as it rises for an ephemeral moment, but then rapidly plummets down on a bed of leaves (112).

At first I couldn’t ascertain and comprehend the implication of this consequential description until it was thoroughly explained in the discussion. The significance of the “bars of sunlight as white as bones” was relatively difficult for me to assess because I didn’t fully associate the representation of innocence and purity of the white with the transitory, but powerful periods of happiness and serenity that Donny occasionally experienced throughout the duration of his visits to Cal’s house, or the ultimate “teenage wasteland.” The reference to the “cleanly picked bones” as a representation of Cal’s predatory motives is now apparent to me, as this could imply that alas, the rapacious Cal was successfully able to seize and ferociously “devour” his “prey,” the vulnerable, defenseless, and unsuspecting Donny, who never saw it coming.