A Father's Promise

“Daddy, do you have to leave again?” The five-year-old looked at her father with tears in her eyes.

“Arielle, no tears…I’ll be back before you know it.” Her father gently wiped away a tear that had managed to roll down his daughter’s cheek. “You do want that doll house you saw at the toy store yesterday don’t you?”

Arielle nodded.

“Well, sweetheart, I need to go do my job to make enough money. I promise you that when I’m back the first thing I’ll do is take you to the store so you can pick whichever doll house you like.” He picked up his daughter and set her gently on her bed making sure her blanket was tucked neatly around her.

Arielle giggled, her hazel eyes no longer sparkling with tears but with laughter. “It’s okay Daddy, you can take a shower first. You always smell like fishies when you come home.”

He chuckled and tickled her stomach, “Really now? And here I thought you loved it!”

“No! Ewww!” She laughed. Her father stopped tickling her and kissed her forehead. “Daddy…why do you gotta be a fisherman? Why can’t you just work on houses like Maggie’s dad?”

“Because this is what I do. We all have to do something we’re good at and I am really good at fishing, don’t you think?”

“Of course you are! You’re the bestest fisherman daddy in the whole wide world!” She exclaimed with a huge smile on her face.

“Is that right?” He looked at his daughter with a mixture of pain and pride in his eyes. “I’m going to miss you and your mother so much, but I promise I will be home soon.”

“Okay, Daddy. But how long will I have to wait?”

“Just a month, honey. In one month I bet you’ll see my boat on the sea on its way home,” he explained.

Arielle sighed. “Fine but I’ll miss you like crazy!”

“Me too, sweetheart, me too…Now, go to sleep and I’ll see you in one month.” He kissed his daughter’s cheek and made his way to her door.

“Goodnight Daddy,” she yawned.

“Goodnight Arielle.”

The next morning Arielle woke up and, sure enough, her father was gone. Every night she prayed her father would come home sooner, after all she was only five and she wasn’t exactly sure how long a month was. Every day, despite what her mother would tell her, she walked to shore and looked out into the sea. Any time she would see a boat that resembled her father‘s, her heart would pound in her chest.

And so it was for a month, until she was finally in her father’s arms again.


Structuralist Analysis (Analysis #2)

In “Course in General Linguistics”, Ferdinand de Saussure states, language “is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings”(59). With this in mind, it s possible, then to look at a painting as if it were its own language.

Whenever we look at language, the mind is trained to look at its separate aspects individually and then as a whole to produce one meaning. Reading a sentence, for example, requires the mind to look at each word (signifier) separately, generate some kind of image (signified) for the word, and therefore, create a sign with a specific meaning for that word. The meaning of the sentence is then created from the combination of the meanings from every word. When we look at a painting, the mind does the same thing, except instead of a words, we deal with separate images. This is why we often walk away from a painting with a certain emotion or with new knowledge.

The painting above depicts a little girl standing in front of the ocean. The eyes are immediately drawn to the little girl, making her the focus of the painting. The child’s arms are open, by her sides, and her feet are on the coast, barely touching the water. One of her legs, however, is raised, allowing only her toes to touch the sand. The little girl is also facing the ocean, not the viewer. This, along with the child’s body language, makes it seem as though she is anxiously waiting for something.

The painting also makes it possible for the viewer to look at the ocean in the little girl’s point of view. The viewer’s eyes are then drawn to the ocean and to the white smudges in the distance. The fact that the white smudges are floating allows the viewer to perceive them as boats. Because the child is looking into the ocean and the boats are the only objects on the ocean, the viewer gets a sense that the child is looking for a specific boat, or perhaps waiting for one to arrive. This then creates a feeling of longing that is transferred to the reader.

Works Cited

Saussure, Ferdinand D. "Course in General Linguistics." Literary Theory: an Anthology. By Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 59-71. Print.