Margaret Atwood’s “The Labrador Fiasco” was striking,
primarily due to the uneasy, anxiety-ridden tone that stretched its way from
beginning to end—an effect of Atwood’s literary style, tone and diction. The
shift from the reality of her situation to the fictional tale that ties the
family together resonated well in consideration of her father’s worsening
forgetfulness; It made the reader feel disheveled and never completely settled,
and I admire Atwood’s ability to make us feel a bit of her father’s illness and
even to an extent, the tension between all the characters involved.
The way in which, at the very beginning of the essay, Atwood
effectively displays a long passing of time and pulls us along her timeline, is
just as effective. “It’s October; but which October? One of those Octobers…it
looks like [she’s] hunching. In reality that is just the shape she is now”
(189). With these words, Atwood harps on a feeling we’ve all felt before- the feeling
that time has gone by too quickly and we don’t exactly know where it went, in
some cases even a desire to travel back in time and adjust something. That’s
absolutely how I feel as a second-semester junior in college, and I think that
a lot of students (and sequentially, other readers of this piece) would agree
with me in how relative this is to our lives.
What really hit home for me was the way in which, by the
last few pages of the piece, it was clear that her father wasn’t going to get
any better, rather, he was going to get worse. At one point, she is talking to
her mother about how her father has been (after having been gone for awhile),
and her mother responds by saying that he needs to walk but doesn’t want to. On
a personal level, this reminds me of some of the older relatives I have (I’m
sure we all have at least one elderly relative) that have a hard time walking
or doing things that I can do easily, or that I have seen them do years ago. What
Atwood flawlessly did was place those who are close to my heart in the place of
her father, and emotionally, that was an effective move for her to make. I
instantly felt for her, and the downhearted tone by the end of the piece leaves
us feeling a sense of foreboding and anxiety, undoubtedly her feelings exactly
as she realizes her father doesn’t trust her and that things are going
downhill.
Overall, “The Labrador Fiasco” is a story of time and of
aging, and not only are those themes universally relatable, but with Atwood’s
skillful diction, they’re also empathy-inducing. The way that she is always
coming-and-going from the house and from her parent’s sight reminds me most of
myself as well as other college students who live away from home. After being
someplace new for so long, I return home to find that a lot of things in my
family have changed, even if it’s just the dynamic between my parents or some
new medication my mom has to take for cholesterol, for example. I believe that
Atwood’s powerful and relatable theme and ability to mirror her own feelings in
her readers during such a uneasy time in her life is what makes “The Labrador
Fiasco” such a resounding piece.
- Brittany
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