Crossing - Mark Slouka

Crossing – Mark Slouka

Growing up, you always think of your future as a time in your life when you have a husband or wife and you have started a family together. You probably end up getting it all, but you’re not sure that it will last forever. About 50% of marriages end in divorce. This can hit both the parents and the kids very hard, and people don’t always know how to handle stuff like a divorce. Some handle it really well. If you have younger kids it might be a little more difficult since they don’t always understand stuff like that, and then you are scared of saying or doing anything wrong. This is exactly what our main character in the story Crossing is going through.

The story, Crossing, takes place Tacoma in Washington State in the US. Our main character in the story is a man who got divorced not too long ago from his wife. They have a young son, and the father is afraid of loosing his relationship to his son. He therefor decides to take him on a trip. He is very careful about everything he says and does with his son. He feels guilty because of the divorce and how they have to raise their son now, and he really wants to have a good and healthy relationship with his son and his ex-wife. This is why he takes his son on a trip with him, because he is hoping that he can make up for everything that has happened. The father obviously cares a lot about his son. Another reason why the father takes his son on this trip is that he wants to pass on the tradition he had with his own father to his son, and he keeps comparing the trip that he is on with his son to the ones he used to go on with his own dad.

The son in the story seems like a sweet and fragile little boy that needs his dad in his life to protect him. He is described through the father’s thoughts, so we don’t exactly know how the son feels and what his thoughts are.

Crossing is written from the father’s point of view, so we only read his perspective of everything and read all of his thoughts, so it’s a third person narrator that tells the story. As readers we get access to all the father’s thoughts and emotions. In the story there is a lot of jumping back and forth between the past and the presence and it can get a little confusing to read because of that.

The river has a significant role in the whole story. The father thinks to himself that it is bigger and stronger than he remembered. He’s starting thinking about death. The fact that the river is stronger than it used to be could symbolize that the father finds it a lot harder to cross the river with his own son than when he used to cross it with his own father. It might not have been as hard and scary when he was with his own father, cause at that time he had someone stronger and older to look after him. Now he has to be that person himself. He also kind of describes the river as some sort of monster that wants to get rid of him. We don’t find out if they make it to the other side of the river.