Question

Think about Marlene's relationship with her father and what it reveals about the story's theme. You should identify at least three moments in the story that reveal the theme and support your claim with textual evidence using in-text citation (page numbers--not lines).

Answer 1

Answer: The theme of this story is that the dad fails to see that the daughter is there for him, so she tries to make him happy with bird noises to give him the false hope that the heron is still alive. Yet earlier that day, she found the dead remains of the actual heron.

Explanation: - Saw himself in the heron. A lonely soul without a mate. That's why he invested so much energy on it as it helped him to forget his own tragedy even if for a bit.

- To allow it to live a free life without anything stopping it. He possibly wants to free himself from his past too- let go off his pain.

- He doesn't want to admit to Marlene what the heron meant to him. Both he and the daughter try to hide their grief from each other.

- She wants to protect him from the pain too. Both father and daughter know about the pain that each is in even though they are unable to talk about it.

- To give her father some closure. She saw how desperate he was getting and she didn't want to see him suffer anymore.