social construction in A River Runs Through It.
...was pre-occupied with taking after his father, by being determined to learn the English language as a young boy. Norman was very respectful towards his mother and father, and as Norman got older, he became an avid student of literature, eventually attending Dartmouth College. Paul, on the other hand, as a young boy was very careless, only worrying about his skills in fly fishing, while he disobeyed is father quite frequently. His personality was very reckless, as demonstrated during the scene where he convinces Norman to accompany him over a dangerous waterfall in a wooden boat. As Paul gets older he stays in town as a newspaper reporter and descends into gambling, drinking, and more dangerous acts. To identify the unspoken rules and norms that each brother exhibits with their behavior during this movie, we can use several of the Axioms of the Interactional View. For starters the words of Axiom one “one cannot not communicate” applies to this brother-brother relationship in so many ways. No matter what Norman or Paul did, whether they were mad at each other or not, they were communicating in one form or another. For example, in the scene shown in class where Paul is telling Norman that he wants sardines on his sandwich, it is very obvious, that by the expression on Norman’s face, he does not want sardines, and since Paul would not listen to his verbal no’s, it results in another form of communication, which happened to be a nasty fist fight between the brothers in the kitchen. Each brother’s set of rules and norms influenced the social construction of their sense of reality. Norman’s reality was to learn, grow, and to make something of himself, which was illustrated by how well he treated his mother and father, and how he made every decision with caution. Paul’s reality of the world was clear and blunt. He believed that as long as he could fly fish, there was nothing else to it, and the drugs, and alcohol were not a problem for Paul’s future plans, because he really didn’t have any. Axiom 3 which states that the nature of the relationship depends on how both parties punctuate the communication sequence is a great example of what happened when Paul decided to change the spelling of his family’s last name. Rev. Maclean was very disappointed, and he punctuated this incident as being wrong and very offending, while Paul didn’t punctuate his actions with anything. Paul was not ...