A Conversation with My Father

An allusion is a passing reference to something that is widely known outside the world of the text. In “A Conversation with My Father,” allusions are usually references to other literary works, in particular, the Jewish Torah and the Christian New Testament. The second version of the story that the writer tells describes the mother’s kitchen as being stocked with “honey and milk”—an allusion to Exodus’s description of Israel. Moreover, the title of the girl’s periodical is an adaptation of the following biblical passage from the gospel according to Matthew: “Man does not live by bread alone” (Paragraph 30).

The significance of these allusions lies in the ironic way that Paley employs them. The mother’s kitchen is only a promised land for drug addicts, and the girl’s periodical is devoted to health food—a subject that seems trivial in comparison to Jesus’s words. By referring to these religious passages, Paley highlights the petty concerns and self-deceptions that preoccupy her characters. However, Paley’s motive is not simply to poke fun at the mother and girl. By using religious passages in reference to her characters’ ordinary lives, Paley also undercuts the seriousness of those passages. In other words, Paley’s use of allusion mirrors postmodernist skepticism of the “grand narratives” of earlier eras, which attempted to provide an overarching and unified vision of the world.