It is implied that the father in the story is a very hairy person. In paragraph five of “The Man Who Mistook His Hat for a Meal”, “The cans relax, dented and lint-covered, against the nastiest shaving kit you have ever seen in your life.” Due to the lack of nutrients in the food the father ingests, we can gather that the father must be very scrawny and malnourished. The narrator describes the father’s ethnicity as Greek. In paragraph eight, the narrator clearly states, “I used to think of this as standard Greek behavior until I realized that ours was the only car in the church parking lot consistently swarmed by bees.”
