Literature is a great source of stories that can be compared with fates of people in everyday life. Often we encounter injustice and prejudiced opinion, kindness and compassion. When an author develops a definite topic, he or she can use personal experience or inventive methods. However, even fictional stories find practical expression in our life through implicit meaning or features specific of characters. The short story Boys and Girls by Alice Munro can be considered the most appropriate when talking about relationships in families where children belong to different sexes.
Sometimes it seems difficult to have a brother, but I understood that my situation is similar to the situation of the main character of Alice Munro’s story Boys and Girls. As well as that girl I have to live with a feeling that my help is not considered the real one. The same happens with her when her mother tells, “Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you’ll have a real help” (Munro 3). I do not blame my parents for upbringing us as representatives of different sexes, though it is not fair to treat women as girls and boys as men. The theme of sex discrimination can be traced throughout the story; however, this is not I mean.
The next episode from the story which can be considered very close to my personal experience is the part when the girl was helping her dad without saying a word. This is exactly about me; my dad is a good person, though he can say something that he does not mean and these words would offense me, my brother, or my mother. The connection to this particular story grows more when I read a paragraph about the girl’s mother who likes to tell everything about her youth. My mother is an easy-going person who maintains the house. Unlike the girl from the story, I like to help my mom with the house because I do not think that men are capable of doing this kind of work.
It is so typical for male representatives of my family to treat me like a girl. In addition, I find myself a heroine of the story Boys and Girls written by Alice Munro when her father says, “She’s only a girl” (Munro 9). Sometimes I can do with it and stay calm when addressing it in that way, though sometimes it drives me crazy because I feel it unfair to be treated like a girl who can do nothing without men’s help.
In our family, we all do our best to keep the house and yard clean, though such concepts as food and cars have nothing in common. This means that some aspects of our life remain divided in terms of gender roles. So, I can indicate another similarity between me and the main character of the story: her father accepted her help without talking much about gender work or her being a girl as well as my father does not mind when I help him. It is natural for my father and me to do something together.
To conclude, I would like to point out that sometimes girls should be considered as only girls as well as men should bear responsibility and fulfill obligations towards their families. This story presents my life in some way because I have managed to find many things in common with the main character of the story Boys and Girls. Consequently, I can say that while talking about relationships in my family where children (my brother and I) belong to different sexes, I can refer to the story by Alice Munro.
Works Cited
Munro, Alice. Boys and Girls. Ed. Kelly Snow. Women in Literature, 1998. Web.