The Negative Effects Of Generational Expectations

After realizing that he was not his father and most likely would never be able to achieve what his father had; Mr. Hicks was forced to leave his life brilliance and enter a lackluster life overshadowed with mediocrity. Mr. Hicks’s life has shifted from soaring through the sky and to “rid[ing] commuter trains” and “serving on committees” (28; 29). The life Mr. Hick’s has been dropped into is one that he can never truly be happy in because it will never compare to the life he lived when he worked with his dead. The pain and disappointment that Mr. Hicks had to go through left him “wishing [that he could have] drowned” like Icarus had because at least then he would not have to go through life knowing he was not good enough to have the life his
Field’s also highlights the negative effects of generational expectations by placing Icarus’s story into a modern setting because in our current society this problem is more pronounced, so when Icarus’s story is placed in a contemporary setting the generational expectations are much more pronounced and easier for the reader to comprehend. In the contemporary setting Mr. Hicks is representative of Icarus and in this contemporary retelling instead of dying—like Icarus did in the myth—Mr. Hicks had to live out his life in the mundane society of the twenty-first century. The fate that Mr. Hicks suffers is far more tragic than the fate of Icarus because Mr. Hicks is forced to live with the disappointment of not being able to live up to his father’s example. He is stuck with the constant reminder of how average he truly is by being surrounded by sameness of the suburbs, and was forced out of his bright world of knowledge and possibilities into the cold, dark world of reality where people do not care about each other and violence reign