Stil... Haster lidt!!

Håber nogle er oppe... ville høre om i hurtigt ville kigge det her igennem for de værste fejl.. det hele er gået lidt stærkt...

Essay: East meets West

This story is about Hamid, and I think Hamid’s biggest problem is that he has an expectation to his son, Arif, which his son not can live up to.
Though the whole story we hear about how Hamid year by year crawls up on a higher social level in society. At the same time Hamid crawls up on a higher social level, his expectation to his son Arif do the same and he pay a lot of money to send his son to a private school. I think Hamid hope that the private school can learn his son good manners, and make Arif very good at school, so he also in the future will stay a part of the upper class in society. Through time, Hamid has namely also dissociated himself from the weak people in society, he now has the feeling that he is something “special”, because he is move to a better part of the town, and probably also because he is a Muslim, and in their religion people don’t drink and take drunks like the weak ones.
In the text line 138-141 there is a good description of his change: “Hamid remembered how once, years ago, he had called an ambulance when he found a person in this state. Now he just walked on, making a detour round him.”

I think some themes in this text could be religion, because it plays a part in this story in the way that Hamid probably don’t like the weak ones in society, because of his religion. And the relationship between father and son, in the way that we through the whole story hear about, how the relationship between Hamid and his son changed.

Arif can not take his father’s expectation. I think Arif want to be young, and not think so much about the future right now, he is just fourteen. Hamid not use enough time with his son, he using all his time on the Empire Store. Arif’s reaction on all this is that he becomes one of the weak ones instead of what Hamid wished that he would have been a strong one. At the end of the story, Hamid found his son sprawled on the bed with beers and some magazines on the floor. Arif was become like the weak people, Hamid look down to.

We also see this father-son relationship in the story “My son the fanatic”, here the father discovers that his son start to sell his things, and the father have no idea why he’s son does it. Ali’s father also use a lot of money on his education, and have high expectations to him, but he gets disappointed when his son gives up his education and instead getting religious. “East meets west” and “My son the fanatic” is also both about integration / culture clash. The stories is about to immigrate families who have to be integrated.
In the story “The stack” McCreedy end up with find his identity like Arif and Ali also do.

And in “The stack” I think the dangling steak maybe can symbolise McCreed’s state of mind. He feels like a dead peace of meat. And the pile of plates underneath the dangling steak symbolise the problems of McCreed’s life that has done nothing else but growing larger and larger.