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Allusions
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—The Grandparents:
As Noah introduces the reader to his extended family, he brings his grandmother Frances and grandfather Temperance into the picture, illustrating them as foils:
The only semi-regular male figure in my life was my grandfather, my mother’s father, who was a force to be reckoned with. […] His name was Temperance Noah, which was odd since he was not a man of moderation at all. He was boisterous and loud. […] When he was up you couldn’t stop him, but his mood swings were wild. In his youth he’d been a boxer, and one day he said I’d disrespected him and now he wanted to box me.
My grandmother Frances Noah was the family matriarch. […] She’s barely five feet tall, hunched over from years in the factory, but rock hard and still to this day very active and very much alive. Where my grandfather was big and boisterous, my grandmother was calm, calculating, with a mind as sharp as anything. If you need to know anything in the family history, going back to the 1930s, she can tell you what day it happened, where it happened, and why it happened. She remembers it all.
Related Themes:
