A Story I Loved: "A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus

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I am fascinated by this story because it includes a dialogue between two beings, one of who, in theory, cannot speak. Or at least in the human language we are accustomed to. And yet Dubus manages it.

The story's premise is this: Catholic man loves his daughter. His daughter accidentally kills someone. The Catholic man covers it up.

Terrible, eh? At least one would think so, when removed from the particulars of language and detail and the way the story is told. That's the nice part about literary fiction. The plot is not really the point. It's the particular way that we tell the story, the particular revelations we unearth.

It's funny, to me, as well, that a story about Catholicism obviously has guilt as a central tenet of it. And yet the story is much more interesting for what it chooses to do with that guilt. It wrestles with it, but in a very unique way. It shows a human making what are unmistakably his own choices, not ordained by that of any higher being or moral authority, and as a result, showing off the complexity, the smallness of human life. Of doing, in that fatal moment, what one believes to be right, truly, sincerely, and hoping that that belief is enough.

I wondered, when writing about it, if I was particularly endeared to this story because of what it says about faith. I don't necessarily think so. What Dubus does well here shows that faith and religion can lend itself to good art. Religious art often has to stick to a very small list of rules, to act more as a mouthpiece for advertisement of the religion than it is art about the person making it: which is to say, deeply reflective, deeply personal art. I think that's why sometimes religious art can fall short. One can begin to mistake the religion for the person telling the story. When the truth is that the centrality of Catholicism rests upon the edict that we are all imperfect, and thus, we struggle in our perfect completion of faith. It is an act, not a feeling, as a priest I once knew liked to say. But why can it not be both? Faith, just like human life, is so wildly contradictory, so deeply nuanced. Just like life, it is different to each person who experiences it, and thus it cannot be put into a box.

I love that the conversation Dubus is having here is not dogmatic or condescending- it asks the question and cannot pose a real answer, only the illusion of an answer achieved by one's own systems. It doesn't fall to the safe answers, to the safe questions that a story like this might ask. It is so true. The dialogue here haunts me, but for all the right reasons. Dubus's character must argue for his own actions, and he knows that he cannot be excused. According to the binary, he is wrong. He accepts that potential.

In fiction, things exist beyond the binary. They begin to move into more human ways. We cannot justify the narrator's actions either way because we are neither God or the person killed, who are theoretically the only two people in this story who have the power to forgive. But we can look upon Dubus's character's actions, and marvel, wondering how we have gotten to such a messy, morally complex point, and somehow, all of the traditional rules, of both fiction and morality, are thrown out of the window. We deeply, painfully empathize with him. We understand him. Are we right? Are we wrong? What Dubus says here is that it doesn't matter. Just stay with me, he says, both to the reader and to God. Listen. As my Creator, as my fellow human, that is all I am owed, and I will take it gladly.

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Read "A Father's Story" here: https://abctheology.pbworks.com/f/FathersStory.pdf