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Describe an important relationship between characters in each text. Explain how this relationship helped you understand an idea (or ideas) in each text?

Father and Son by Owen Marshal and Night by Linda Burgess both had important relationships between characters. In Father and Son the important relationship was between a father and his son. In Night the relationship is between the parents and the child. In Night the family are going to witness Halley’s comet out in the country, but the mother objects to this outing. Both these stories have important character relationships; the relationships also helped me understand the main idea of family and relationships in both these short stories.

In Father and Son the relationship between the father and son is close. The warmth between them was an “aura”. This shows that they are very close. The symbol of their relationship is a “slot car track” the father and son have been working on together. The mother in this story thinks it is good that they have a strong relationship, but she wants the son to play with other Children his own age, and she thinks they are spending too much time on the slot car track. “The two of you and that track”. This relationship helped me understand the main idea of family and relationships.

In contrast to the strong relationship between the father and son. Their personality differences complicate the relationship. The son is an overachiever and the father is slow. We see this early on in the text when they are eating breakfast. “The boy watched impatiently at the way his father spread the butter and marmalade purposefully to each corner of the toast”. This shows that the father does everything slowly and purposefully and he doesn’t get much done, while the boy is an overachiever and does everything quickly. This shows the personality differences between the two, which foreshadows a break up in the relationship. This relates to the idea of conflicting...