Essay: Analyse and interpret Mark Slouka’s Short story “Crossing”

Write an essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse and interpret Mark Slouka’s Short story “Crossing”
The short story “Crossing” is written by Mark Slouka in 2009. The short story brings us all on to a trip, where a father takes his little son into the forest to cross a river. The father also wants to spend some father-son quality time together out in the wild nature. The father takes his son to the exactly same places he went with father, when he was seventeen. This short story is about family bonding and a dangerous trip to the wild nature.
The father’s plan for the weekend is to take his son out on a father-son trip into the wild nature, just like his own father did when he was in his young seventeen. The father carries their packs across a shallow but fast moving river, and then he goes back and carries his son across. When they get to a barn, the father barley recognize it, they spend one night in the barn and then the next day, they move on to explore the nature. But when they cross a river again, he knows the current is a bit stronger than the other day. He crosses the river with all their things and then he gets back to the kid. When he takes the boy back across, the father lose his footing, although he do not fall, he is moved downstream with about four or five feet to a point that makes it seem too impossible to even move forward or back. He then remembers of like his father spoke to him as a kid. His father yelled “Don’t fucking fail.” In the end of the story it ends with the father in the middle of the river, telling his son that they are okay, but they are not, and say they shall hang on.
The information that Mark Slouka scatters in the beginning of the story makes us want more and it also make us care deeply about what happens to the son and the father on their trip. We see the son’s smallness and also his entire childhood in those small jeans. We see the father’s deep depression in the simple line “…and he hadn’t been happy in a while.” We know the father has a bad history with his own father and love for the river valley “…nothing much changed.” Later in the story we get to learn more about the fathers need for “…the nests of vines like something scratched out, the furred trunks, soft with rot…”Slouka has already made the father an expert on this place. In the beginning of the story we see how the father picks up his son from his regular home, with his mother. We know the parents are divorced and separated. We learn that the father has done something wrong; because of his hope to maybe he could make this right. We see his care for his son, like care not to hit his son’s head on the ceiling when he playfully takes him over his shoulder.
This leads to a strong and trustful father – son relationship. To appreciate the family bond, this is one of Mark Slouka’s main themes, where you gain an insight into the father in constant search of the role as a brave and lovely father, while bringing up the theme man vs. nature. But the theme is also about failure as a parent and also that you shall learn from other mistakes, and thing that really have a big impact that you will not forget.
The father is a man in his thirties or around that age as he has a young son and has been married. He had a bad childhood and a bad relationship with his father and therefore he will de anything to give his own child a good childhood. The father feels that he has failed a bit because he and his wife have been divorced. The fact that the father is divorced is not written directly but as he is sitting in the driveway outside a house, he looks at the yard and “…the azaleas he’d planted.” This can indicate he once lived there. When the father picks up his son in the morning, he gets a hope that he will be able to make things right again. The trip to the old barn across the river with his son is a small step, but he truly wants to make up for the bad things he has done. He needs his son’s approval and trust that are seen in how he always tries to comfort his son as they cross the river. At one point the reader gets a hint about the reason behind the divorce. “My God, all his other fuckups were just preparations for this.” It is the father who has destroyed the marriage and he knows it. In all he is very reflective and his thoughts play and important role in the story. His thoughts are marked by panic and among other thoughts he has vision of death like a tunnel at the end of the road. In the story the father does not just cross the line of the powerful phenomena of nature but he do also push the trust between him and his son to the limit as he stands thigh-high in the water after he slipped and still tells his son to just hang on, he might have reached the limit.
Mark Slouka does two tings at once in the short story. First, he takes the father back and forth across the river, with their backpacks and then with his son on his back, and then an identical set of return trips the next day. The first set of the trips allows the story to tell us the river and also the care required to cross it too. There are many flashbacks in the text. For instance, the father remembers when he was seventeen and were crossing the river with his father and asking “What do you do if you fall?” And his father answered “Don’t fucking fall.” It then becomes clear where this story is heading. But yet we also forget this inevitable end because of the second thing Mark Slouka does in the text. While the river takes a central place in the story the focus is actually on the fathers memories and thoughts. In fact, the river doesn’t even appear until later. The story opens in the house of the man’s ex-wife where the man is picking up his son and ends with an open ending where the father and son are standing in the middle of a river. This get us to worry about them and set the question of what will they do and how will they get out?
The language in the story is very easy to read, maybe because it is not an old text. But it uses a lot of the modern style in it, so then it will be easier to get through and to understand. it is not a formal language, since it says “fucking”, so it is more of an informal text.
Part of your essay must focus on the narrative technique and the significance of the setting.
Through a third person limited narrator, the reader is presented to a father, who has a hard time in the life after a divorce from his ex-wife. Then he is now determined to find something that matters and has set his heart on maintaining a strong and trustful relationship to his young son.  As the narrator only know what the father thinks, feels and remembers, it is told from his point of view. We get some scenes of the things that he struggles with. Because of the limited narrator there is no insight to the son’s mind, instead the author uses physical decryptions through the father’s eyes, who picture him as a small boy “he looked over at the miniature jeans…”
The setting of the text is that it happens in Tacoma, which is a city in Washington State in the USA. It takes place in the summer or spring?, because even though it is raining , the father and son still sleep in a tent out in the forest, and jump into the river. This indicates it is not winter. In the text we also get to know there are stars on the sky at night. This setting helps us to understand the crossing, and the current we will meet on the way. The setting of the text is pretty much based on the nature. If it was not for the place they were at the time, they would not have had to make the crossing, which in the end caused them a lot of problems. The setting of the text is describes with some adjectives, to show the colors and the feelings, the setting makes the protagonist feel, like when the father has his flashbacks.