¶ … Father's Tears"
In his short story "My Father's Tears," author John Updike contrasts his childhood perceptions of his father's tears as the father sent his son away to college on the train with a present-day perspective. As an older man, the narrator now understands what seemed like sentimentality. The young narrator was merely impatient to grow up and was impatient with his father. The main point of the story is the inaccessibility of knowledge and the limited perspective of the young until it is too late. Although Updike's story is very much a product of its place and time -- a mid-20th century New England still filled with old-fashioned Transcendentalists, commuters who go to the city by train, and a society in which smoking is a rite of passage -- the relationships between parents and sons are eternal.
Much of the story evolves in a series of comparisons between the narrator's father and mother...
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