Carl Nixon Documented Essay “Fractured families can bring out the best and worst in people” (Carl Nixon). How do fractured families affect a person? In his short stories, Like Wallpaper and My Father Running with a Dead Boy, Nixon elaborates on the difficulties of living in a fractured environment and how it contributes to the development of an adolescent. Nixon skillfully composes stories that attribute to the transition of time and the hardships of maturing and becoming independent. In My Father Running With a Dead Boy and Like Wallpaper, Carl Nixon uses flashbacks to reveal the hardships of adolescence, which appear in the image of the dead boy and the reappearing image of photography and how these images ultimately distinguish the future …show more content…
The dead boy symbolizes the how the narrator feels. The flashback during his father’s funeral states, “Ray was dragging the kid by the shoulders” but at the end “Trevor was dead” (My Father Running with a Dead Boy 447). Nixon specifically uses this flashback to replicate the ruined relationship between the narrator and his father. flashback the reader understands the internal struggle the narrator has as he remembers his father. The narrator struggles with accepting the lack of love in the relationship and still finding gratification with his past. The scene ends with “a dead boy” that Ray “cradles him gently as though the boy weights nothing, a baby” (My Father Running with a Dead Boy 448). The image of a baby alludes to the narrator’s adolescence and even innocence. The narrator longs to be carried and comforted by his father like the dead boy. The scene reveals the pain and sorrow that the narrator felt during his childhood and his desire to find peace with the past. By using a flashback Nixon’s “impacts” the reader until, “the reader forgets that this is a story” and “reacts in a personal experience”(Marhsall). Nixon exposes the readers to the yearning sorrowful feeling of the narrator, so that the reader is able to relate and empathize with the