Father’s impact their children in various ways. A father’s actions can help their children grow up and have opportunities that they didn’t have. These actions are showed in the short stories The Boat by Alistair Macleod, Cages by Guy Vanderhaeghe, and in Beyond My Father’s Shadow by Gordon Chambers. When the sons were young their father’s actions seemed hurtful and disappointing, they later realised that their fathers were trying to help them have a better life.
In The Boat, the son didn’t understand why him getting an education was so important to his father. When he didn’t go to school one time so that he could help his father his father told him to go back to school the next day. The son didn’t want to go back to school, he wanted to help his father on the boat, “I
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He never felt that he would live up to how his father wanted him to be. The son, “often resented him”(p.1), because he, “felt inadequate in his presence”(p.1). The son couldn’t understand why his father acted as he did, with verbal lashings and sometimes violence. When he was younger he, “vowed never to be a power-obsessed, chauvinist bully like I thought my father was”(p.1). When his younger brother came along it got worse as he fell into his father’s footsteps and did “typical male” activities, such as throwing a ball around. He grew farther away from his father and grew to dislike even more. Later in life he realized that his father’s “ways” helped shape who he was today, “Dad does have his ways, but if I’m a product of them, they couldn’t have been all that wrong”(p.2).He came to understand that him and his father are two vastly different people, and that his father only wanted him to be successful in his life. When he was younger he couldn’t understand his father, but as he grew older and had time to think, he realized the importance of his father in his