My Fathers Tears by John Updike

¶ … Father's Tears" In his short story "My Father's Tears," author John Updike contrasts his childhood perceptions of his father's tears as the father sent his son away to college on the train with a present-day perspective. As an older man, the narrator now understands what seemed like sentimentality. The young narrator was merely impatient to grow up and was impatient with his father. The main point of the story is the inaccessibility of knowledge and the limited perspective of the young until it is too late.

Although Updike's story is very much a product of its place and time -- a mid-20th century New England still filled with old-fashioned Transcendentalists, commuters who go to the city by train, and a society in which smoking is a rite of passage -- the relationships between parents and sons are eternal. Much of the story evolves in a series of comparisons between the narrator's father and mother and his experience of his ex-wife's Unitarian father.

Deb's father was an austere, competent man who died from Alzheimer's, in contrast to the narrator's more conventional father who blamed all of his own marital trouble on 'women's issues.' The families were different both in temperament and faith: although a minister, Deb's family did not believe in dogma, while the narrator's family refused to do work on Sunday. Ultimately, the differences between Deb and the narrator were too much, something his father blamed on Deb's lack of femininity.

The narrator, now older and wiser, can appreciate his father despite his father's faults and also appreciate his father's sentimentality, however imperfect the past might be. People are both changing and unchanging in the story. On one hand, age takes away people's minds and bodies. On the other hand, during the narrator's reunion, he envisions everyone still in kindergarten, despite the group of his peers is made up of grandparents with walkers. "We don't see ourselves that way, as lame and old.

We see kindergarten children -- the same round fresh faces" (Updike 11). They are surprised to learn the narrator's father died -- it underlines their own mortality, as it does the narrator's. This surprise and regret at aging is universal, just like the tears of the father which opened up the story. Updike suggests that until we are actually confronted with death it is very easy to ignore the passage of time. The story ends with the words: "I hung up, and shared the news with Deb.

She put her arms around me in the bed and told me, "Cry." Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of it, I don't believe I did. My father's tears had used up mine" (Updike 14). The final sentence takes the story 'full circle' from the narrator's birth as an adult to his father's death. It is as if he finally understands why his father.