The Father’s Vision

The Father’s Vision

                The Central Tension or the main idea of Li-Young’s Poem “A Story” is that the dad should always acknowledge what is in the present and not in the future and two literary devices the author uses to make the main idea is irony and metaphor. In the short story, a father is with his son on his lap and the little boy is asking for a story. But the irony behind that is that the father with a brilliant knowledge about wonderful stories can’t think of any. “In a room full of books in a world of stories, he can recall not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy will give up on his father.” This develops the central tension because the father visualizes the future and can see his son leaving the house permanently and can’t acknowledge about how the son will leave him soon if he didn’t tell him a simple story. The central tension is very important on how it developed because a father will fail his son many times over like the situation of not being able to tell a story. The second literary device Li-Young Lee uses is metaphors. When the father is visualizing when the son leaves the father they argue. “Am I a god that I should never disappoint?” He is being compared to a God in which Gods are to never fail. The reason he is compared to a God is because children usually look up to their parents as Gods. They know what’s right from wrong and judges the child’s actions through discipline. This develops the central tension because the son expected his father to be a perfect “God” who would protect, love, teach, and “tell stories” in which the father could not perfect resulting in the child leaving his father in the future until at the end of the poem he realizes they are still both together with him rejuvenated into a young child from the father’s envision. This is why both irony and metaphors helped develop the central tension of “A Story” by Li-Young Lee.

-Ji Lim