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Miscommunication In Cate Kennedy's Like A House On Fire

1054 Words5 Pages

Humans are inherently social beings that crave love, the sense of belonging and intimacy from others. The desire to feel love would help us create an understanding of who we are as we seek comfort through our personal experiences. Although we might fall short of these expectations they could also be the source of pain and angst. In a compilation of short stories ‘Like a house on fire’, Cate Kennedy explores different relationship dynamics through how they cope with life-changing events. Most relationships in Kennedy’s short story are portrayed as complex characters, and tend to be distant from other family members. Throughout Kennedy’s short story, each character undergoes a series of physical and mental challenges, through these challenges …show more content…

In whirlpool we see the two children struggle with keeping up with their mothers the standards that they were forced to live by. The mother wants her children to be successful only through the lens of a perfect family. Without any communication the children tend to get lost in parental actions. As the mother gets overly obsessed with the ‘perfect’ image, she lacks the understanding of others causing a misunderstanding with her husband and children drawing a distance. Another example of miscommunication is through tenderness, occurring when Anthony and his wife have misunderstandings taking in “zero care" when it comes to family dinners and their marriage. The issue occurs when his mother criticises the wife and has a constant rebuttal against each other, without communicating with Anthony to resolve the issue, the couple tends to wait for the issue to pass by. Not only does this cause long term problems within the relationships , this could further damage the relationship with his mother. The reason why I can connect to this issue personally is through my family problems, observing from a kids perspective you can really decipher what occurs in a relationship, which tends to be the lack of communication. Many small issues could easily be resolved with small conversions and understanding each other from different perspectives. Kennedy has illustrated how characters portray their abilities to deal with new realities leading them to distant marriages by using the contrast of the expectations within

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