A Secret Lost In The Water Analysis

Sometimes the relationship between two generations is very complicated. “My Father Is a Simple Man” by Luis Omar Salinas and “A secret Lost in the Water” by Roch Carrier explore these universal themes, the greatness of love together with the unavoidability of conflicts between two generations through the depiction of the speakers’ personal experience with their fathers.

In “My Father Is a Simple Man”, the speaker expresses his love for his father deeply by highly complimenting that his father has sincere “kindness and patience” (Salinas 23) to take the speaker on “lifelong journey” (Salinas 9-10). In the end of the poem, the speaker firmly believes that he should “have learned” (Salinas 36) something from his father which states a manifestly

In the poem, the speaker and his father “argue about the price of pomegranates” (Salinas 4) and he tries to convince his father that “it is the fruit of scholars” (Salinas 7). Conversely, his father believes that his son should simply “eat more oranges” (Salinas 11). Pomegranates and oranges have absolutely different features which symbolizes two types of lifestyle, one is complex and well educated as a writer, the other one is simple and poor educated as a worker. Meanwhile, in the short story “A Secret Lost in the Water”, even though the narrator’s father has a strong desire to pass on his traditional skill, using an alder bough to find “spring beneath the earth” (Carrier 2) as a portion of vital household wealth through generations, the narrator has a great passion for literature and much later, he becomes a writer. This underground spring is a significant clue in the story which symbolizes an old wisdom, a part of family heritage and a close relationship between two generations. More importantly, the earth that the narrator is unwilling to dig is a symbol of the conflicts in communication between two