Analyse af Mark Sloukas novelle 'Crossing'

The shot story ”Crossing” is written by Mark Slouka in 2009. The short story brings us through a dangerous situation about a father and son trying to cross a wild river. It is a great trip for a father to spend some quality time with his son out in the wild nature and to bond with each other. It is very typical for an American family, to have such values about a “father and son relationship”. The father in this story takes his son to a place where he went with his own father, when he was young. This brings me to the theme of the story, which could be “disappointment” or “failure”. It is mentioned that the father has done a lot of “fuckups” and he does not want this experience with his son to become one of those fuckups.

At the beginning of the short story we are introduced to the father, and the difficult period of his life that he is in. The father reminds himself of his own childhood, when he was seventeen years old and went with his father on a trip into the wild. He gets very disappointed when he returns with his son and realizes that the barn and all the other things in the forest are barely recognizable. He might have had a bad relationship with his own father and does not want the same relationship with his own son. He also remembers some of the bad things about his own father, especially the way he spoke to him as a child, when the father yelled “Don’t fucking fall” (p.2, l. 63).