Tayari Jones Poem Sorrow

Becoming a father requires sacrificing all of one’s time and dedication to being responsible for the loved ones that are dependent upon your reliability. A father’s task when it comes to his children is to have his presence known throughout the important times of his child’s life and to provide an example of how a man is supposed to act within our society. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, the theme of fatherhood is shown through the narrator’s memory and how she viewed her father as being a dictator throughout her life. In Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow the theme of fatherhood is displayed in both Dana and Chaurisse’s lives as they both deal with the absence of their father James, which leads to the girls’ poor choice of men and their many rebellious

Plath describes her false deception of men by stating, “I thought every German was you.” (29). Plath provides a negative correlation with her father calling him a Nazi which adds to his evilness and shows that she knows no better than what he had shown her during her early stages of childhood. This translates directly into Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow when James states to a young Dana, “No. You’ve got it the wrong way around. Dana, you are the one that’s a secret.” (9) Being a young child Dana only wants to understand the extent of her father’s love and never wanted to hear from the man that she cherished that she has to be kept a secret just because he has another family. James’ harsh words had such a great impact on Dana that she soon became

In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, the narrator develops the theme of fatherhood throughout the poem as she has flashbacks of how he treated her and the impact that he left on her life after he passed. The theme of fatherhood is seen in the second part of Tayari Jones’ Sliver Sparrow through Chaurisse’s point of view, which entails to the reader that her and Dana’s actions are almost exactly alike. The situations that occur in Chaurisse’s instance can compare to the ones in “Daddy” in a sense that Chaurisse had figured that she had known who her father was all her life, but there was always just that one thing that she could never figure out about him. This is supported on lines 22 and 23 in “Daddy” when the narrator states, “So I never could tell where you
\Put your foot, your root,” (22-23). This adds onto the understanding that Chaurisse was also living proof of James’ lie because Dana had been born before her but he still attempted to look after both families. His idiotic attempt of masculinity and trying to be secretive played a large role in Dana’s life as she had begun to interactive physically with boys at a very young age looking for affection. Her current boyfriend, Jamal, is a representation of the man that her father displayed himself as in front of her as he is no better than James and doesn’t respect Chaurisse