The document summarizes key passages from the first chapter of the novel "My Son's Story" that discuss several important themes: 1) Recognition and identity as the main character encounters his father for the first time. 2) The importance of education and how it shapes the main character's views on equality and social responsibility. 3) The central role that work and community play in the characters' lives and sense of purpose. 4) The complex relational dynamics between family members and how relationships change over time.

1. Lecture 11: How We
Find Out Who We
Are
PATRICK MOONEY, M.A.
ENGLISH 10, SUMMER SESSION A
8 JULY 2105

2. O! that you were your self; but, love, you are
No longer yours, than you your self here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again, after yourself's decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold,
Against the stormy gusts of winter's day
And barren rage of death's eternal cold?
O! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know,
You had a father: let your son say so.

3. How
narrative
works
Take a look at the
beginning of the first
chapter of My Son’s
Story.

4. Recognition
“There was my father; the moment we saw one
another it was I who had discovered him, not he
me.” (1)
“And then there he was. What are you going to
see? he said. But I had seen.” (25–26)
“if she gave Sonny everything else of herself, it
would have been worth less if she had not kept to
herself some fibre of personality as a separate
identity.” (5)

5. “Let’s take your placards into class and rewrite
them. When you want to tell people something
you have to know how to express it properly. So
that they will take you seriously.” (22)
“What face did he make me wear, from then on,
to conceal him, what he was doing—my
knowledge of it—from us: my mother, my sister,
myself.” (33)

6. Education
“The boy was Will, diminutive of William. He was
named for Shakespeare, whose works, in a cheap
complete edition bound in fake leather, stood in the
glass-fronted bookcase in the small sitting-room and
were no mere ornamental pretensions to culture.” (4)
“Sonny and his wife did not covet ‘Granada’ or
“Versailles’; with an understanding of Shakespeare
there comes a release from the Gullibility that makes
you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the
world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.” (8)

7. “Equality; he went to Shakespeare for a
definition with more authority than those given
on makeshift platforms in the veld.” (19)
“children learn from modelling themselves on
others, mimicking at first the forms of maturity
they see in their parents and then coming to
perform them cognitively as their capacities
grow; why should they not be learning
something about themselves, for themselves,
by mimicking the responsibilities recognized
precociously by certain other children—their
siblings.” (22)

8. Work
“They found that for them both the meaning of life seemed
to be contained, if mysteriously, in living useful lives. They
knew what that was not: not living only for oneself, or one’s
children, or the clan of relatives. They were not sure what it
was; not yet. Only that it had to do with responsibility to a
community; and that could only mean the community to
which they were confined, to which they belonged
because the law told them so, in the first place, and that to
which the attachments and dependencies of daily life and
the shared concerns that came from living within it, made
them belong, of themselves.” (6)

9. “He no longer had a profession; his profession
had become the meetings, the speeches, the
campaigns, the delegations to the authorities.”
(32)
“Where would she find work in Johannesburg?
Her kind of work. I suppose I could do―
something else . . . get taken on in a
factory. Aila was referring to his connections―
with the clothing industry, he know; it alarmed
him. Unthinkable that through him Aila should sit
bent over a machine. Jostle with factory girls in
the street.” (35)

10. “He no longer had a profession; his profession
had become the meetings, the speeches, the
campaigns, the delegations to the authorities.”
(32)
“Where would she find work in Johannesburg?
Her kind of work. I suppose I could do―
something else . . . get taken on in a
factory. Aila was referring to his connections―
with the clothing industry, he know; it alarmed
him. Unthinkable that through him Aila should sit
bent over a machine. Jostle with factory girls in
the street.” (35)

11. Relationality
“For what she wanted was, in essence, always what
he wanted; and that is not as simple or purely
submissive as it sounds. I didn’t—don’t—pretend to
understand how. It was between them, and will not
be available to any child of theirs, ever.” (17)
“He was the pride of the old people and the
generic diminutive by which they had celebrated
him as the son, the firstborn male, was to stay with
him in the changing identities a man passes
through, for the rest of his life.” (3)

12. “A changing vocabulary was accompanying the
transformation of Sonny to ‘Sonny’ the political
personality defined by a middle, nickname.” (35)
“Sonny had had to change his mind about so many
things, as his life changed, as the very meaning of
his ridiculous name changed—first a hangover
from sentimental parents, then a nickname to
reassure the crowds at rallies that he was one of
them, then an addendum to his full names in a
prison dossier: ‘also known as “Sonny”‘. A common
criminal with aliases.” (45)

13. “It was a tactic, displaying high morale to the
judge, to confront him day after day with alleged
revolutionaries looking like businessmen.” (46)
“The message beyond that extraordinary
prescience—that would enlarge upon it, confirm
a language of shared reference between himself
and the writer of the letter—was obviously
something she would understand.” (50)

14. “When did the distinction between black and
real black, between himself and them, fade, for
the schoolteacher? That ringing in the air,
‘equality’ beginning to heard as ‘freedom’—it
happened without specific awareness, a
recognition of what really had been there to
understand, all the time.” (21)
“I spoke to him for the first time. Biology. On―
Tuesday. And so there was complicity between―
us, he drew me into it, as if he were not my father
(a father would never do such a thing). And yet
because he was my father how could I resist,
how could I dare refuse him?” (27)

15. The terms of discourse
My mother said I looked tired. I think he ought to―
be taking Sanatogen.―
―Oh Aila, you don’t believe that nonsense! He―
was smiling at her. (26)
“And every now and then, in the carefully arranged
and guarded life he was managing, when he judged it
was time to approach Aila again—to pretend to want
poor Aila, oh my god.” (63)
“Now I couldn’t help laughing at my sister, how could I
give her the satisfaction of taking her seriously.” (110)