Voice, tone, and atmosphere in "What Broke My Father's Heart" and "Patient

¶ … Broke my Father's Heart and Patient

Examining Voice, Tone, and Atmosphere in Katy Butler's "What Broker My Father's Heart" and Rachel Riederer's "Patient"

Dealing with any medical issue or condition is never an enjoyable experience. Having to experience hospitals, surgeries, and life threatening situations can be scary and can harm the individual and the entire family unit. These themes are prevalent in the two essays examined here, although they do approach the themes quite differently. There are some similarities in the voice of the narrators; although overall, the tone and atmosphere of the two works are dramatically different. Katy Butler's "What Broker My Father's Heart" is gloomy and filled with extreme detail and information, while Rachel Riederer's "Patient" is erratic, fast paced, and almost nonsensical.

In "What Broker My Father's Heart," the voice is a tired expression of grief. The reader is dropped right in the middle of the narrative. The story opens with a telling conversation between mother and daughter. The voice of Butler's work evolves, but does carry a sense of sad nostalgia. There is an overwhelming gloominess when she describes the present situation, with describing the difficult conversation she is having with her mother. Yet, the tone turns quite nostalgic as she goes back in time to describe her parents before their lives were ravaged by the onslaught of dementia on her father. Her voice describes with pride the type of man her father was. He was quite endearing and motivated, despite having lost his arm during service in World War II. This sense of nostalgia continues into her description of her parents even in their senior years, only a few years before the current narration takes place. She writes, "in short, they were seemingly the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well" (Butler 1). However, the narrator's voice then turns to a much darker place, as she describes her father's stroke and his sharp decline in health that negatively affected both him and his wife. This harkens back to the formerly optimistic tone of the discussion of her parents' health, as it turns ghastly sarcastic. Her father's pacemaker was now making her parents suffer more and more each day by keeping him alive in such a debilitated state. She comes to see how the medical advice to get the pacemaker might have been part of a broken system, where "Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all," (Butler 1). Medicare was essentially paying for unnecessary treatments. This results in over spending and negative impacts in the personal lives of the patients who so unknowingly place their trust in doctors looking for more cash. The pacemaker seemed to become a source of contention, as the narrator continues to describe the failing health of her father over several years, and the toll it toll on the family. Eventually, her father's health got to what was known as "the dwindles: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better," (Butler 1). All the pain had made an impact on the family, making her mother not want to go through the same experience, and putting a strange sense of eeriness on the narrator's voice.

The voice in "Patient" is quite different from the one in "What Broker My Father's Heart," although they do share some instances of nostalgia. Again, the second essay in this analysis, the reader is dropped right in the middle of the situation. There is little explanation to why the situation is occurring, but rather an opening right in the middle of things, just like in Butler's "What Broker My Father's Heart." The voice in "Patient" seems to be like it is written in a way one would write in a diary. Moreover, the narrator presented is much more unreliable and erratic compared to Butler's gloomy, yet methodical voice in "What Broker My Father's Heart." Here, the narrator is faced with a life or death situation. The narrator has just been hit by a bus, yet at the hospital they show a strange sense of not understanding how serious the situation is. Riederer writes "She wants to cut off the shoe on my left foot; I cannot let her. I love these shoes! They are Mary Janes, but they are soft and have soles like sneakers, and they are pink with red checkers" (Riederer155). This begins to unravel a tone of confusion, but also shows how the narrator's voice is much more unreliable than the more educated and informative voice of the narrator in Butler's short essay. Yet, there are instances where the voice of the narrator shares the same nostalgic voice that is seen in Butler's work; "When I was about four years old, my parents made a tape of me talking about the first Thanksgiving, and they play it every year for anyone who will listen. On it, I talk in a baby voice about how the Indians made best friends with the pilgrims and shout a singsong imitation of Miles Standish inviting Chief Massasoit over for hot dogs" (Riederer 159). Yet, this nostalgic voice is different because it does not really add any background to the story, but only further continues to show the erratic nature of the unreliable narrator.

The tone Butler uses throughout the poem is quite dark and melancholy. Butler also provides a sense of long, drawn out weariness in the tone she uses throughout the essay. Her sentences are stretched out; slowing the rhythm of the words and making time seem to slow down. She uses soft, melodious language to help smooth the slowness of the transitions within her language. This helps establish the sense of gloom and monotony that has taken over the characters' lives, especially that of the narrator's mother and her father with dementia. Butler describes, "She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared our the window," (Butler 1). This tone seems to allow the reader to tap into the pain and anguish dementia has caused the narrator's family to feel. It is a vehicle for both sorrow and ongoing struggle in an increasingly hopeless situation. This comes with a hint of sadness; "The pacemaker brought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell" (Butler 1). The tone continuously gets darker and darker as the story goes on, showing the anguish and heartbreak that was coming out of the situation.

Much unlike "What Broker My Father's Heart," however, the tone of Riederer's short work is much choppier. The sentences are incredibly short, but yet still filled with a sense of urgency and action. Riederer is much more direct and to the point in the style of narration. There is a much faster pace that is seen compared to Butler's work. However, the narrator does spend more time personally describing themselves and their situation; "I am a junior in college, and tomorrow I am going to a big tailgate where I will drink beer and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, laugh with my friends in the cold," (Riederer 154). Overall, there is a tone dominated by confusion through most of the story. This begins at the very moment of impact, "someone beside me fell, and then I fell. While I was still lying on the cold asphalt, the bus moved forward a little, and its tires rolled onto my leg. It stopped right there, breathing its exhaust and the smell of hot rubber on me. Do all buses have four tires in one cluster like this, two across and two deep?" (Riederer 154). The confusion tends to follow the narrator through her journey of recovery. This correlates to a narrator who is less educated on the care they are receiving.

Butler presents a very detailed, yet strikingly strange atmosphere. Butler's writing is incredibly descriptive, adding in environmental details to make the reader feel as if he or she is actually part of the narrator's experience. In a detailed outline of a conversation with the narrator's mother, Butler writes "she had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low," (Butler 1). Butler provides her readers enough information to pull them into the experience and make them aware of an entire environment, rather than only a limited glimpse restricted to only the words of the characters.