Anaphora and Memory in Bakopoulos's "Some Memories of My Father"

Introduction: Anaphora as Emotional Structure

Dean Bakopoulos's "Some Memories of My Father" uses the rhetorical device of anaphora — the deliberate repetition of words, phrases, and verbal constructions — in order to provide both an emotional and intellectual structure to the protagonist's experience of losing his father. The chapter is primarily a mood piece, a kind of prose-poem that derives its restrained emotional force from poetic devices, chiefly anaphora. It stands as the second chapter of Bakopoulos's short and casually surreal 2005 Detroit-set novel Please Don't Come Back From the Moon. Notably, "Some Memories of My Father" does not invoke the overall surrealism of the novel's central narrative thread until its final sentence. Otherwise, the prose is intended to be evocative word-painting, and it gets its power from rhetorical structure rather than plot.

Whitmanian Cataloguing and the Universal Father

The first segment of "Some Memories of My Father" begins with a wealth of concrete details. In a sense, this is not repetition per se, but rather a device akin to Whitmanian cataloguing, in which the concrete particulars of the father's morning — poached egg, toast, newspaper, slippers, cigarette — crowd the mind of the protagonist. Bakopoulos then makes a remarkable maneuver, using these concrete particulars to leap toward quasi-Platonic universals: the narrator confesses that it was "true that I missed my father, but in a larger sense I missed all the fathers" (28). Bakopoulos continues with a Whitmanian cataloguing of all these fathers and "their big and clumsy presence," his use of the singular "presence" signaling that the reader is invited to imagine a collective, generalized figure. In this way, the reader is encouraged to map his or her own experience of a father against Bakopoulos's set of generic stage-properties, and presumably to experience the same kind of universalist recognition that the narrator intends.

The Shift to Autobiographical Specificity

The first segment concludes with a particular irony. Only about two pages in from the title heading "Some Memories of My Father," the narrator confesses that in fact "I could remember very little about my father" (28). It is at this moment that Bakopoulos begins an insistent use of anaphora to structure his Whitmanian catalogue of details, now capturing memories with the kind of close attention previously used for generalization — but now autobiographically specific. Bakopoulos structures the section almost as though each paragraph is a long poetic line. The paragraphs, when they begin, are notably short for a novel: each contains a brief and abstractly rendered memory — "my father is smoking and sweating, swearing at some sort of a machine" — preceded by a minor variant on the narrator's age at the time: "I am three years old," "I am four," "Five years old," "When I am six" (28–29).

Conclusion: Memory, Loss, and Surrealism

The larger import of the chapter is contained in the moment when the anaphoric structure breaks down. It works through "when I was fourteen" but then abandons the protagonist's fifteenth year entirely. Ultimately, Bakopoulos's novel invites us to read the chapter's rhetorical machinery both as an act of personal mourning and as a literary device — the surrealism that closes the chapter holding both readings in tension simultaneously. The anaphora, the cataloguing, the careful age-by-age accumulation of detail: all function as a formal enactment of grief, preserving through language what time and loss have made irretrievable.