The short story “A Conversation with My Father,” written by Paley contains two narratives. The first one is autobiographical – the narrator, a writer, describes a conversation with her father about her work and future. The second story is created b the main narrator in two versions, both describing a mother and a son dealing with addiction. The interrelation of these parts makes the whole text a metaphysical work, and Paley uses it to comment on the state of literature and the definition of “short stories” that are often considered traditional. The standard for short story narratives is provided in the main part of the text. The father says that his daughter does not write simple stories, “he kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov,” describing the lives of recognizable people and situations that happen to them (Paley, p. 159). In response, the narrator creates a dry description of the events that her neighbor went through. The second version of this story has more information and jokes, but it is still different from what her father expected.
Here, one can see the difference between what the narrator and her father pay attention to in storytelling. The writer in the story does not want to write an ending for her characters, trying to give them a chance to recover. The father, in contrast, sees the deep tragedy in the described events and calls his daughter to acknowledge it. The story’s postmodernism qualities lie in the author’s desire to break the rules of traditional storytelling and remind the reader about the malleability of fictional works. Through the narrator, Paley denounces her authorship of the addict’s life by refusing to give her a bad ending, thus further using postmodernist techniques.
Work Cited
Paley, Grace. “A Conversation with My Father.” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985, pp. 159-168.