Crossing by Mark Slouka

921 Words4 Pages
Crossing Mark Slouka’s story Crossing is about the relationship between a father and his son, and their camping trip in the wild nature. For a long time it has been tradition for fathers to take their sons on camping trips to form a special bond between them. On these trips it is custom to teach their sons how to conquer nature, passing this knowledge down through generations is a part of the tradition that comes with these father and son trips. These are the two goals the protagonist has for this trip. The setting of the text is in Tacoma, which is a city in the state of Washington, America. It takes place in springtime, we know this because even though it’s raining in the morning when he leaves to get his son, but I quickly clears up, and if it were winter or fall he wouldn’t be able to cross the river nor sleep outside in a tent. The description of the setting is thorough. Slouka uses adjectives to describe the colors and the feelings that the setting brings to the protagonist. We see this when the protagonist has flashbacks, an example of this could be: “He stood there, listening to it seething in its bed, to the inane chatter of the pebbles in the shallows…” this describes the river that he and his father had to cross when he was a kid, just as he has to cross it now with his own son. The setting is significant to the text because it helps the reader understand the crossing and struggles or the current you will meet during the crossing. In the very beginning of the story we are told that the protagonist hadn’t been very happy for a long while, which most likely stems from his divorce with his son’s mother. We learn that they are divorced in the beginning of the text, when the protagonist is picking his son up from the mother’s house. When he is on his way out he looks at her and she shook her head and he thinks: “maybe – maybe he could get this right.”
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