Answer to Question 1
- This parable is often remembered as the story of an ungrateful, dissolute younger son who returns to his father after years of a profligate lifestyle. (Its traditional title, The Parable of the Prodigal Son, surely contributes to this overly narrow focus.) However, the parable is more richly complex; it is, as the opening line tells us, the story of two brothers: A certain man had two sons.
Few students will be able to define the word
prodigal. You may want to refer them to the dictionary definition: reckless and extravagant waste of ones property or means. The younger son wasted his substance with riotous living, and, from the elder son, we later learn that his brother has devoured their fathers inheritance living with harlots. There is no doubt that this younger son is all the synonyms of the word prodigal: wasteful, reckless, dissolute, profligate, extravagant, licentious, immoral, and shameless. However, the storys twist is that the older son has wasted his fathers love in a different way, for he is bitter, angry, ungrateful, selfish, and disrespectful. (Timothy Keller, a popular writer and New York City pastor, suggests that it might be the father who was actually
prodigal in his love for his sons.)
Answer to Question 2
- The tone of the story could be described in a number of ways: shrewd, knowing (even when, as discussed above, she doesnt know as much as she thinks she does), tough, hard-edged, even disillusioned. Every balloon that the narrator inflates with the hot air of her parents dreams and promises is readily punctured by the realities of the familys situation.
The dream that the narrators mother has spun and clung to is a dream of a very different house from the small, cramped one on Mango Street, and so is the house that her father talked about whenever he bought a lottery ticket. Although they recognize that the house on Mango Street isnt it, both parents seem to see the housewhether truly so in their own minds or simply in an attempt to keep their childrens hopes aliveas a way station in the fulfillment of their dreams, not as the end of the line, the outer limit of their real-life possibilities.
But the narrator seems to have been around enough blocksLoomis, Keeler, Paulina, and others that she can no longer rememberto have already grasped a sense of the limits of the American dream for people like her and her family, people who dont win lotteries and whose dreams are destined to remain merely dreams: I know how these things go.
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