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Summary Of Short Story 'Fusilli'

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Fusilli: Text A
Everyone will one day experience the agonizing emotion known as grief, nevertheless time heals all wounds and there are ways to cope with the pain. Without the bad we wouldn’t be able to appreciate the good, therefore we sometimes ought to be reminded that life is short but worth living. Overcoming grief and pain is a central theme in the short story “Fusilli” written in 2014 by Graham Swift.

The short story is focused around a father who is the protagonist and his relationship with his wife Jenny and his adopted son Dough. Dough is a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, while his father and mother live their lives at home, shopping for pasta and abolishing Christmas. One day while shopping the narrator receives a call from Dough, …show more content…

Furthermore, it seems as if the protagonist as a father can’t connect on a deeper level with his son, even though he loves him unconditionally. The symbol about rewinding the clock can be interpreted as the start of a flashback or simply as summertime having ended. Dough getting a toy gun as a gift when he was a child can additionally be seen as a foreshadowing or symbol of him joining the military, but more importantly to his father fusilli is a symbol of Dough and his everlasting memories of him. This can be connected to the title which is actually not just a reference to pasta, but a symbol of living on after your death, because the dried stuff lasts forever.

The message of the short story is essentially about evolving past the bad emotions and accepting life as it is, full of sorrow, but also mixed with happiness. It can be concluded that the main theme in the story is grief and the narrator is a third person omniscient except when there is quotations and direct speech where it is instead a first person narrator. Furthermore, the title symbolizes life, death and pain. Finally, the message is about appreciating what you have and in the end the protagonist has learned to not move on from his son’s death, but cope with

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