Learning in College?...That’s Crazy!
... the end of the story, when he realizes that his dad is not so bad after all, should be insight for all students to keep in mind. Throughout the story, he has a very egocentric tone due to his position as a son and as a student, believing he already knows everything, as many teenage college students often do. His position as a son leads him to remark heavily at the beginning of the story about how much he disliked his life and how being a kid under the wrath of parents was horrible and unfair; “I was stuck in my egocentricity, certain that no one in the world had ever had such a terrible father or had to contend with such unfairness. After all, my father hadn’t even finished high school, and here I was, a mighty college student!!”. Through this very common experience that every kid has with their parents, it is very easy for college students to relate to McCarthy and makes his position very understandable from the point of view of any college student. With the angle of vision of that of a former college student, he very effectively gets his point across through the easily understandable structure and style of his work. The style of his simplistic sentences of medium length and colloquial language easily relates to college students as displayed in the remark, “When I looked at the face of the card, I discovered he had written ‘What does the ‘son of an idiot’ do with the rest of his life’. It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.” With the simple style and easily understandable syntax, he seems to be directly carrying on a conversation with the reader, making it easier for college students who have difficulties in their lives involving parents and tries to help them out by teaching a lesson that he learned when he was in the same position. McCarthy used many different examples of figurative language throughout his story, another example of his style. Rhetoric (verbal) irony plays a huge role in his story in that he describes his view of his father in the beginning of the story as “ My parents didn’t please me at all, I was chafed under my father’s direction and correction. I saw him as controlling and wanted to break free” and ends his story with the statement “Our fights diminished and eventually disappeared. I had learned that my father was a smart, wise, and loving man.” This understatement is very relative to the lives of college students in that they often say things of this nature about their parents, usually out of spite or malevolence, even though they don’t really mean it and they know and believe the exact opposite. He also very effectively uses rhetorical questions throughout the story, not intending for the audience to verbally respond, but just to keep in mind and contemplate as they consider the remainder of the story and to remind them of situations they may have been in or can relate to. He effectively portrays this is an example such as, “ What does the ‘son of an idiot’ do with the rest of his life?” Most college students have thought that they were the offspring ‘of an idiot’ (parents) sometime in their lives and this example of style really touches the reader and makes them think about a relative time in their life that this incident may have occurred. At the beginning of the story, he uses a great example of a metaphor in comparing adolescence to a violent storm by saying, “Children take so many risks and do so many crazy things that it’s hard to see how they manage to get through it all. When they get to adolescence, it gets even crazier. Tossed around on seas of hormones, pushed and pulled by t...