Essay On Pathos In Honoring Mothers And A New Perspective

Pathos, the element that evokes sympathy and sadness, is a fundamental quality that overarches both Joyce Maynard’s “Honouring Mothers: Four Generations” and Janice E. Fein’s “A New Perspective”. Both stories utilize the oftentimes overlooked theme of family to express emotion, and thus uses pathos to engage and allow the reader to fathom and sympathize each situation, both concluding with a death of a motherly figure. However, the two stories utilize a different approach in terms of the mood and atmosphere in which it is told, where “Honouring Mothers: Four Generations” revolves around a continual reminder that the role of being one’s daughter is temporal, and concludes when the mother dies, whereas “A New Perspective” focuses on the aspect
However, as the story progresses, there is a final realization that “[the narrator] may never understand why some of us are cheated in life. I only know…that I am not the one who was.” (Fein, 59-60) This realization is quite a turning point in the story, and as it occurs in the last sentence of the story, it signifies that to substantiate one’s statement, in this case, the narrator’s statement of “Cheated in Life”, requires being in the role of the person, and as the frustration from the narrator’s recollection of the childhood memories builds, there is still an underlying sense of ignorance from the narrator’s displeasure due to the mother's’ illness. But when the narrator re-examines the apparent displeasure the narrator had whilst being a child, the realization of the emotions and disposition that a motherly figure possesses coincides with the recollection of childhood memories, and this sparks the truly rational conscious understanding of the ignorance the narrator had with her childhood