Alexie's Common Themes

Father/Son Relationships

One of the many common themes Alexie uses is the relationship between his paternal figures.  The relationship varies throughout the pieces- sometimes they're bad, sometimes distant and sometimes relaxed.  I found a connection with a poem and a short story I found interesting.  Reading the "Father and Son Road Show", we see the son struggling to convince his father to stay on dialysis.  The son doesn't care if "he's planned to die or not" (16), he still wants to save him.  In a short story we read, "Witnesses, Secret and Not", the son says, "my father was forty-one and that's about the age that I figure a man starts to think about dying...or starts to accept it as inevitable" (213).  I thought this connects back to "Father and Son Road Show" in that maybe the father in that poem has already accepted dying, but the son hasn't accepted the fact his father is dying.