Home Is Where I Belong
Home is where I belong
The sacrifices, the beliefs, and the values parents implant in their children will help determine the person they grow up to be. A child is like a sponge that absorbs their parent’s thoughts and viewpoints that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. A bad event can scar them for life. For example, if a parent constantly yells at their child for no reasons and shows no signs of love, the little one’s childhood would consist of nothing but bad memories. This is exactly what happened to Shelly, the Indian girl from the “Homecoming”. The female protagonist definitely suffered immensely due to the lack of parental love and the constant battles in the house. Her careless parents would never stop blaming her for every little thing causing her to run away from home at a young age. Because of the bad childhood and painful memories, Shelly turned her back against the most important person in her life; her father. By the time she started to appreciate him, it was already too late, he was on the verge of death. In the short story of the “Homecoming”, through the strong use of metaphor, symbolism and irony, Sunera Thobani stresses how a sudden can drastically alter the way one sees parental love.
The author uses metaphor to compare the house of the main character to the father’s life. In other words, the house IS the father. For example, Thobani describes the house as “always cold and damp” which corresponds exactly to the old man’s personality; he is a cold-
Cam 2 hearted father (16). Not only they both share similar traits, but they are also living the same “life”. In other words, whatever happens to the old man also coincidentally happens to the house. For instance, the young girl hates the house as much as she hates her father. In her eyes, the house is nothing but a “filthy, stinking hole” because whenever she is in the house, she feels trapped like she can never escape from all the “never-ending battles between her parents” (15 and
The sacrifices, the beliefs, and the values parents implant in their children will help determine the person they grow up to be. A child is like a sponge that absorbs their parent’s thoughts and viewpoints that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. A bad event can scar them for life. For example, if a parent constantly yells at their child for no reasons and shows no signs of love, the little one’s childhood would consist of nothing but bad memories. This is exactly what happened to Shelly, the Indian girl from the “Homecoming”. The female protagonist definitely suffered immensely due to the lack of parental love and the constant battles in the house. Her careless parents would never stop blaming her for every little thing causing her to run away from home at a young age. Because of the bad childhood and painful memories, Shelly turned her back against the most important person in her life; her father. By the time she started to appreciate him, it was already too late, he was on the verge of death. In the short story of the “Homecoming”, through the strong use of metaphor, symbolism and irony, Sunera Thobani stresses how a sudden can drastically alter the way one sees parental love.
The author uses metaphor to compare the house of the main character to the father’s life. In other words, the house IS the father. For example, Thobani describes the house as “always cold and damp” which corresponds exactly to the old man’s personality; he is a cold-
Cam 2 hearted father (16). Not only they both share similar traits, but they are also living the same “life”. In other words, whatever happens to the old man also coincidentally happens to the house. For instance, the young girl hates the house as much as she hates her father. In her eyes, the house is nothing but a “filthy, stinking hole” because whenever she is in the house, she feels trapped like she can never escape from all the “never-ending battles between her parents” (15 and