Sunday in the Park

Sunday in the Park

Many happily married persons would laugh and say “I am the one who wears the trousers” if they were asked. That would be a joke, and they wouldn’t think further about it. But what happens when authority isn’t equally divided? And how does the mutual issues in the family then impact our children?

     Sunday in the Park is a short story written by Bel Kaufman in 1985. It deals with many familiar themes and describes them with just a short instance in the park at a normal Sunday afternoon. Many issues aren’t far away.

The narrator is a third person narrator, who doesn’t appear in the story as a physical person.    The narrator is limited omniscient, which is the interesting thing about the narrator because we are getting the feelings and thought directly told but only the mothers who appears as she.

So forth at page 5 line 90 we are told a straight statement from her thoughts about the whole affair.  

      So it’s a third person narrator, and the narrator tells the story from the mother’s point of view.

The fathers’ person reflects in their children. Five main characters appear in the shot story: the mother, Morton, Larry, the heavy kid, and the big man in the park.

      Morton and Larry have a lot of the same personality traits. They are both tentative in their behavior. Larry is described with sensitivity in his face at page 3 line 21 and Morton with a shy apologetic smile at page 3 sentence 39. Furthermore their conformation are both slight.   We are told at page 3 sentence 38 that Morton has a lean face and we know that Larry is small kind compared to the other. Finally they are both smaller than the adversary.

      So all in all is Morton not a big man, but we are told that he is this democratic teacher type whose son has inherited many traits from his father.

On the contrary we have the big man on bench and the heavy kid, who generally is just the opposite of Larry and Morton both physically and in their behavior. They are violent, big, and not reasonable. The fact is we see the inheritance in focus again but with the opposite values.

The mother has some issues with her husband and son. We aren’t told much directly about the mother due to it is from her point of view the others are described. But there are a lot to deduce from her behavior and thoughts. She is clearly up against some issues with her husband’s lack of severity, and thus I would say she is the one who wears the trousers in their relationship. For instance at page 4 line 71 where she describes this felling of something she can’t exactly identify but has something to do with something personal and familiar. Later it gets obvious to us what is wrong, which we likewise see in her thoughts at page 5 line 90, where she is trying to justify for herself why her husband didn’t fought for them.