“This is not a happy story. I warn you.”
This is the opening line of “Great Falls.” The next paragraph goes on to make it clear that the story is being told by a son looking back upon his relationship with his father. He’s right, of course, it’s not a happy story. Or even a particularly pleasant one. It is a story that mixing a confused childhood, a contemplative recollection by a child now grown, strained familial relationships, a sense of isolation and alienation from witnessed events given more depth by the perceptual effect of time. In other words, it is an opening line befitting more than just “Great Falls.” It could well be the opening line to a number of stories written by Ford in not just this collection, but others.
“Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he was anybody like you?”
The questioning here is posed to the reader by the narrator relative to a very specific context. The questions are being posed to readers conditionally: they have just seen a man looking into the windows of cars parked outside the Ramada Inn. This list of queries brings the story to a conclusion and asks the reader to consider everything they have just read for the purpose of making a point about perspective with the inherent suggestion that things are not always what they seem. In fact, much of what one witnesses is contingent upon a very important but usually over looked fact what is observed is dependent upon a life lived.
“Bobby smiled at me then in a sweet way, a way to let anyone know he wasn’t a bad man, no matter what’d robbed.”
“Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he’d never seen before—something soft in himself—he didn’t like.”
Here are two different stories in the same collection that both offer considerations on the possibilities of men being good or bad. Then nature of simplistic, dualistic, either/or thinking is presented as a constant theme through the effect of dual narration in which the past is viewed through the perspective of a distant point in time. Often, events are presented as if taking place in the present and the reflected upon as commentary from the actual present of the narration. This devices allows the author to explore the process of maturation through the shorthand of time management.
‘‘The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that’s happened and by all that could and will happen next.’’
Immediately following this observation, the narrator confesses that he can no longer remember when his father was born or how old he was the last time he saw him. The stories of fathers and sons permeate the collection as do themes related to the passage of time, the flexibility of memory, the fading quality of nostalgia and dissolution of emotional connection resulting from drifting through live as a passive observer rather than an active participant.
