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Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant Analysis

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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler opens with Pearl Tull dying in a bed while remembering events with her 3 children Erza, Cody, and Jane. The book revolves around the relationship between each of the family members as they look back into the past. In the novel, the pieces of the past they choose to remember are like fragments of a torn photograph. Individually, the pieces reflect each one 's perception of his or her experience within the family. However, the author fits these pieces together to create a unified and complex portrait of individuals who are torn apart by the past and alienated by conflict, but who are a family nevertheless. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the past is heavily embedded in all of its main characters, …show more content…

She does not even remember exactly “how it… happened.””She blamed Beck, who through sheer thoughtlessness if not intention had shot her through the heart” (Tyler) “She not only forgets what transpired or who was to blame, but she confuses the arrow wound with the later emotional trauma--being “shot.. Through the heart”-- of Beck’s abandonment” (Henningfeld 2). In Cody’s version of the incident“Ezra took a flying leap with his arms outstretched like a lover. He caught Cody in a kind of bear hug and slammed him flat on his back. It knocked the wind out of Cody; all he could do was gasp beneath Ezra 's warm, bony weight.” He just shot her mother with an arrow (Tyler) “In Cody 's version, it was Ezra 's mistrust and interference that actually caused their mother 's injury, but it was he who was blamed for it. Cody devotes the rest of his life to evening the score: playing practical jokes on Ezra, hiding his belongings, manufacturing evidence against him, and finally stealing his fiancee. This last betrayal, in particular, replicates Pearl 's long-ago injury, especially in its traumatic effect on everyone involved” (Sweeney 11). Cody 's memory of the archery incident, then, continues to shape his sense of his own identity and of his relationship to his younger

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