Literary Analysis for Some Memories of My Father by Dean Bakopoulos Literature Review

Dean Bakopoulos' "some memories of my father" uses the rhetorical device of anaphora -- or deliberate repetition of words, phrases, and verbal constructions -- in order to provide an emotional and intellectual structure to the proagonist's experience of the loss of his father. Bakopoulos' "some memories of my father" is primarily a mood piece, a kind of prose-poem which gets its restrained emotional force from poetic devices (chiefly anaphora): it stands as the second chapter to his short and casually surreal 2005 Detroit-set novel Please Don't Come Back From The Moon: "some memories of my father" does not invoke the overall surrealism of Bakopoulos' central narrative thread until the final sentence. Otherwise, the prose here is intended to be evocative word-painting, and it gets its power from its rhetorical structure.

The first segment of "some memories of my father" begins with a wealth of concrete details: in a sense, this is not repetition per se but more a device like Whitmanian catalogues, in which the concrete details of his father's morning (poached egg, toast, newspaper, slippers, cigarette) crowd the mind of the protagonist. But then Bakopoulos makes the remarkable maneuver of suddenly using these concrete particulars to make a sort of leap towards quasi-Platonic universals: the narrator confesses that it was "true that I missed my father, but in a larger sense I missed all the fathers"(28).Bakopoulos then continues with the Whitmanian cataloguing of all these fathers and "their big and clumsy presence," with his use of "presence" in the singular demonstrating that we are invited to imagine a sort of collective and generalized figure here. In a sense, the reader is invited to map his own experience of a father against Bakopoulos' set of generic stage-properties, and presumably experience the same kind of universalist sense of recognition that the narrator obviously intends.

The first segment concludes with particular irony, though, as the narrator confesses -- only about two pages in from the title heading which reads "some memories of my father" -- that in fact "I could remember very little about my father" (28). It is then that he begins with an insistent use of anaphora to structure the Whitmanian catalogue of details, capturing the memories in the kind of close detail that had been previously used to generalize. Now it is autobiographically specific, and Bakopoulos structures it almost as though each paragraph is a long poetic line. Certainly the paragraphs, when they begin, are short for a novel: they each contain a brief and abstract sounding memory -- "my father is smoking and sweating, swearing at some sort of a machine" -- which is preceded by some minor variant on the narrator's age at….....