August 5, 2014
A) The passage is a perfect representation of the Walls' lifestyle. In many situations with the family, the dad does something questionable but then covers his action with a life lesson. Like in this passage, he doesn't tend to think about what the consequences could be if one of his learning experiences back fired. This also occurs when the dad puts all of the siblings in the back of a moving U-Haul. He is so worried about getting caught that he doesn't even think about the safety of the kids and how they could fall out of the moving truck. The passage also demonstrates Jeannette's tolerant and understanding character within the last three sentences especially. Since she has no other way to explain her father's actions, she tolerates him throwing her into the water. Just like in every other instance of her life, she tolerates her father, but only because she doesn't know any better. This swimming event compares to the fire incident because both are moments of "sinking or swimming." Both times, Jeannette's parents threw her into something without assisting her in any way. In the swimming event, her father threw her into the pool with the only instructions being to swim. He expected her to teach herself, and very quickly at that. For the fire incident, Jeannette's mother was not around even though she was only 3-years-old messing with fire. She was making hot dogs without any instruction to remind her of the dangers of fire. With both events came luck, I believe. It just so happens that Jeannette swam in the pool but sank at the stove.
B) Jeannette literally describes her father in the beginning of the memoir on page 24 by saying, "Dad was a dramatic storyteller." She thought of his stories as dramatic but she liked them that way to make things interesting. Later on in that page, she continued with, "Dad always fought harder, flew faster, and gambled smarter than anyone else in his stories." This comment kind of gives me the idea that she thinks of him in an egotistical way. He always ended up as the hero, even though he might have been bluffing a bit. Finally, Jeannette described her father as having high aspirations by saying, "When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do." Since she seems to have remembered a lot about his future plans, I'd say she would describe him as ambitious. Jeannette expresses trust in her father by always forgiving him and going along with anything he told her. Even though it might not have been the right thing to do, she had no other choice but to forgive him and trust that her father was right. When talking about the swimming event on page 66 she says, "I figured he must be right. There was no other way to explain it." She didn't know any different than to forgive him for throwing her into the pool, even though she could have drowned. I found a quote by Jodi Picoult that I think relates perfectly to Jeannette's forgiveness as a child: "Forgiveness is not something we do for other people. We do it for ourselves - to get well and move on." If she didn't know any better, she would have just wanted to forget about it, and forgiving her father helped in that.
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