Vacation In Juan Forn's Swimming At Night

At that moment, he heard the door. Not the doorbell but a series of soft, polite raps, almost apologetic about the late hour. Every house has a logic, and its laws are more eloquent at night, when things occur without palliative noises. He didn’t look at his watch or jump, or suspect that he was hearing things. He simply got up from his chair and walked toward the door without turning on any lights; when he found himself standing face-to-face with his father. He had not seen his father since his death. And, at that moment, he had the strange realization that he had become used to the idea of never seeing him again. In “Swimming at Night” by Juan Forn, the readers are first introduced to a scene of a troubled man on vacation, who is unable
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. . .” (Forn 345). So far, nothing stands out. The readers might extrapolate a random situation to create a reason why he was here. The narrator then adds, after the slight pause, “He had not seen his father since his death. . . .” (Forn 345). This is where the situation becomes surreal, shocking, and impossible from a reader’s perspective. However, the appearance of his father does not directly shock him, because the husband noticed “at that moment, he had the strange realization that he had become used to the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” (Forn 345). Here, the narrator elongates a thoughtful pause by adding “And” and “at that moment . . .” to still keep established pace and tone, which is that calm, disassociated mood. At this point the father, the reader might think, is a construction of the husband’s mind, because the husband had focused on “the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” which struck him the most out of this chance meeting, rather than on the present moment of seeing him (Forn 345). However surreal this may be in real life, the narrator manages to keep the same weight through the pacing in the story to give this story a certain realism through the husband’s