Reunion Critical Response
Reunion: Critical response
Have you ever planned to meet someone you haven’t seen in a long time and had that meeting turn into a disaster? If not at all what you expected it to be? If you have, you’ll sympathize with Charlie, the alienated son. After not seeing his father for three years, Charlie decides to arrange to meet him at Grand Central Station where he has a stop in a trip from his grandmother’s house in the Adirondacks to a cottage his mother has rented on Cape Cod. The author, John Cheever uses the way in which this meeting was arranged, and shows us the characterization of the father to show us a “reunion” between Charlie and the father that becomes a sad disappointment to Charlie.
The story is simple enough. Charlie hasn’t seen his father for three years, since his parents gotten divorced, and is now meeting him for a couple of hours in New York where his father has been staying. Throughout the meeting, the readers watch both of them struggle to try and save what is clearly a very strained relationship, we see glimpses into their past. In the end, both Charlie and the reader are forced to experience a sad, painful realization, something that Charlie has perhaps understood before the meeting, which he can never have the relationship he has always hoped to have with his father.
As the story goes on we realize that for Charlie this is more than just a meeting: it’s his hope of saving his strained relationship with his father. His father, on the other hand, appears to be an alcoholic who is also rude and arrogant, clapping at the waiters and being noisy and superior. But he seems to want to show his “superior status” also by using words like garcon, sommelier, Kellner or cameriere, and by taking his son to ‘his club’, but instead he appears rather sad, a father desperately trying but failing to impress his son.
His ‘I’m sorry sonny… I’m terribly sorry’ towards the end is more than just a surface apology for Charlie’s father’s behavior on that
Have you ever planned to meet someone you haven’t seen in a long time and had that meeting turn into a disaster? If not at all what you expected it to be? If you have, you’ll sympathize with Charlie, the alienated son. After not seeing his father for three years, Charlie decides to arrange to meet him at Grand Central Station where he has a stop in a trip from his grandmother’s house in the Adirondacks to a cottage his mother has rented on Cape Cod. The author, John Cheever uses the way in which this meeting was arranged, and shows us the characterization of the father to show us a “reunion” between Charlie and the father that becomes a sad disappointment to Charlie.
The story is simple enough. Charlie hasn’t seen his father for three years, since his parents gotten divorced, and is now meeting him for a couple of hours in New York where his father has been staying. Throughout the meeting, the readers watch both of them struggle to try and save what is clearly a very strained relationship, we see glimpses into their past. In the end, both Charlie and the reader are forced to experience a sad, painful realization, something that Charlie has perhaps understood before the meeting, which he can never have the relationship he has always hoped to have with his father.
As the story goes on we realize that for Charlie this is more than just a meeting: it’s his hope of saving his strained relationship with his father. His father, on the other hand, appears to be an alcoholic who is also rude and arrogant, clapping at the waiters and being noisy and superior. But he seems to want to show his “superior status” also by using words like garcon, sommelier, Kellner or cameriere, and by taking his son to ‘his club’, but instead he appears rather sad, a father desperately trying but failing to impress his son.
His ‘I’m sorry sonny… I’m terribly sorry’ towards the end is more than just a surface apology for Charlie’s father’s behavior on that