Thirty-Nine Rules For Making A Hawaiian Funeral Into A Drinking Game

Kira Ridenour
Professor Montgomery-Moore
Short Fiction 236
May 12th, 2023
Final Analysis Paper of Two Stories

“Safari” by Jennifer Egan holds a shifting omniscient view that provides the reader with context into each character's individual stories. This story describes a chaotic family adventure involving Charlie and Rolph, Lou, and his girlfriend Mindy. Charlie and Rolph are Lou’s children, and they are having a hard time accepting Mindy as an addition to the family. “Thirty-Nine Rules for Making a Hawaiian Funeral into a Drinking Game” also portrays a realistic approach to family dynamics. Kristiana Kahakauwila set this story up by numbering one through thirty-nine with instructions to drink when something happens at the funeral. This

In “Safari”, Charlie has been watching the warriors dancing and has noticed she has been acting differently since arriving in Africa. For example, “During her days in Africa, she has begun to act differently—like one of those girls who intimidate her back home. In a cinder-block town that the group visited a few days ago, she drank a muddy-looking concoction in a bar and wound-up trading away her silver butterfly earrings” (Egan, 2). This takes place when Charlie is watching the warriors dance and sing, and noticing how different the culture might be compared to her own back home. The phrase “like one of those girls who intimidated her back home” stuck out to me because the wording here gives the reader a sense that she feels stronger and more powerful than before. We get this sense of power as she gains confidence and “sways” to their music and dances. The quote also gives the reader a sense of rebellion by saying that Charlie was drinking and ended up giving away a valuable pair of earrings. As a reader, it can be easy to relate to this theme of estrangement from the environment you’re in. Most people have had a sense that they are an outcast in a certain place, and it can be uncomfortable, Egan does a great job explaining that feeling. In “Thirty-Nine Rules for Making a Hawaiian Funeral Into a Drinking Game”, there is a strong feeling of estrangement that the narrator is going through throughout the entire funeral. Since she only moved to Hawaii a year earlier, she doesn’t feel like she fully fits in with her family, especially since her mom is white. For example, the narrator states, “You cannot hula or play the uke. You do not speak pi-gin. You never add the right proportion of water to poi. But you can summarize your grandmother’s life in a five-paragraph essay” (Kahakauwila, 3). This happens as the narrator is watching her younger cousin play the uke