Blog 4

Blog 4 John McPhee “The Patch”

John McPhee’s story as it pertains to our class was first and foremost some type of a parallel story or one of the forms of back and forth etc.

It was also emotional in the sense it was a man who was unable to communicate with his genuine feelings. He place of expressing himself he described in a very methodical and sterile way the most minuet details of fishing.

The story that ran beside the fishing story was that of his father’s death. Fishing was something that had bonded them tighter in the author’s youth and while his father lay on his death bed these reminisces brought them to their closest common denominator of each other.

The final sentence even incorporated the father’s tears as the son told of literally and metaphorically catching a fish with the actual bamboo fishing pole of the father. The next sentence confirming that after this break through the father had passed within sixth months.

It seemed as if his times and breaks away from fishing and the internal feelings he received from it could also represent the relationship to the father. Not forgetting or hating or avoiding just never getting around to it. He would even bring the pole on camping trips for years without even using it.

The fact that he found so much insensitivity for the young doctor treating his father who had himself been a doctor seemed to show yet another cycle of life. The fish that would eat their own seemed to show these levels of callousness.

He became better at fishing and better at being an adult and a man and somehow resolved whatever it was that might have been missing with his father and this story was written to elevate the pain.