Analysis Of Madeleine Thien's 'Simple Recipes'

In the short story “Simple Recipes” by Madeleine Thien, the author uses juxtaposition and repetition to shape the meaning of the narrative as a story about unity and its dissolution. Thien uses these elements of design in the juxtaposition of the narrator’s past harmony with her family being played out side by side with her more distant present. Thien also uses the repetition of certain elements such as the fish in order to accurately portray the breaking up of a once unified family.
To begin, Thien first uses juxtaposition in her placement of the past alongside the present in order to emphasize the interrelationship of these contrasting times while also revealing details about the family’s past that strongly ties in with the overall story …show more content…
The mother tells the narrator that if she believes in her own thoughts, she can make her guilt feel smaller and smaller until it is finally gone. This is important foreshadowing as at this moment, the characters do not seem to have anything to be guilty about. The narrator also pictures her guilt as a bruise, which is foreshadowing as the event that she is later guilty about is an act of violence that leaves her brother bruised physically and both of the siblings bruised mentally. The following segment in once again set in the past during night where everything goes wrong. The brother refuses to eat the fish and when he eats the cauliflower he chokes and spits it back out on his plate. The father displays a reaction that seems extremely out of character from how he has previously been described: he hits his son across the face. The family supper has suddenly gone from normal and peaceful to violent, especially when the brother disassociates himself from the family even more by shouting an offensive slur about their race and even saying to his father “[...] I wish you were dead!” (Thien 333). The father hits the son again; however that is not the end of this violence. In the next segment, which is also set in the past, the father is repeatedly hitting his son with a bamboo pole; …show more content…
The fish and its life, which is consistently mentioned throughout the story, is a representation of the family’s unity. The narrator first mentions the fish in a flashback at around the same time that she is reflecting back on her memories of her father and their daily routine. The father is the one who brings in the live fish and dumps it in the sink. This is notable because at this point in the narrative, the family is still seen as a cohesive unit and this parallels with how the fish is still alive. The next point in the narrative where the fish is mentioned is right after certain problems are shown to plague the family, such as the obvious language barrier that separates the parents from their children and the problem of the father and the brother’s conflicting attitudes towards the son’s unwillingness to keep hold of his Malaysian heritage. Paralleling with these problems, the fish is now slowly dying in the sink. As the family’s relationship seems to be falling apart with every little problem mentioned, the fish’s life is also slowly ending. It is also in this scene that the fish is abruptly killed by the father hitting it with a cleaver and then preparing it to be eaten. This action of the fish’s life ending because of the father is represented by the family as it is only a few scenes later, when they are eating the now obviously