A Day At Sunrise Act 1 Scene 1 Analysis

Wolff wrote this scene not as a specific event, but as a scene that would occur every time he, Dwight, his mother and Pearl went to shooting competitions in other towns. His mother would do quite well, and Dwight would lose, blaming his losses on uncontrollable factors like the gun he was using. He felt intimidated by Toby’s mother and pulled into a tavern parking lot and went inside to drink, Toby’s mother followed later, and Toby and Pearl were left in the car. This isolation left Pearl and Toby in a moment where they could connect to each other, and no one else. No one else would understand the tension between parents and anxiety of waiting alone in the parking lot, scared that any minute a drunk “father” would be angered by the sound …show more content…
She is able to put her trust in Toby, not just because there is no one else there to trust, but because they’ve had their singing bonding and they’ve had the same experiences in the past. Toby doesn’t take this trust in him lightly, he tries talking to Dwight “Please, Dwight” so that Pearl would be comforted, but Dwight just mocks Toby, showing that his children’s fright means nothing to him. This mocking “Please, Dwight,” he said, is an extremely basic structure, simple sentence piece of dialogue, buts it is so powerful that it magnifies the conflict in the scene by being so realistic. In life, mimicking often occurs in moments of argument, usually among children because it is such a low-intelligence form of hurting someone else-- exactly like Dwight. He’s a child, and he’s not taking the situation seriously which makes readers even more anxious because the child, Toby, is acting like more of an adult than the adult himself, but unfortunately, the adult still has control over the situation and there’s nothing Toby or the reader can do about