A Conversation with My Father

“Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says, but to a potassium shortage.”

Paley’s story begins with the writer describing her father’s heart as a “bloody motor” that has grown too old to “do certain jobs” but “still floods his head with brainy light” (Paragraph 1). As soon as she has said this, however, the writer draws attention to the fact that her descriptions are just “metaphors”—figures of speech rather than literally accurate reflections of reality. This points to the story’s status as a form of metafiction and to its related interest in how we use language to make sense of the world around us. On that note, it is significant that the writer tempers her father’s medical account of his condition with the words “he says.” The implication is that the father’s description is simply another way of looking at his illness rather than the objective truth.

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more [...] the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”

The above passage introduces the central conflict in the story: the different ideas that the writer and her father have about narrative. The father’s definition of a good story draws on the realist tradition of Maupassant and Chekhov—writers who follow the stories of ordinary people struggling with “real” problems in “recognizable” societies.