Ashes Report Final

Ashes Book Report Draft

By Adrian Greensmith, 802

            The people you love are the people you’re closest to. For example, parents are the source of joy and happiness in so many people’s lives. But being close to them may make it hard to see them. It may blind you from the truth about who they really are. The short story, “Ashes”, by Susan Beth Pfeffer is about a teenage girl, Ashleigh, and a day with her dad. Her parents are divorced and are still upset at one another. During the story, while eating dinner with her father, he asks her to steal security money from her moms’ apartment and give it to him. Throughout the story, Ashleigh is trying to work out her feelings, while making decisions that could end up hurting one of her parents. I think that the author is trying to portray the quandary a person faces when love and mistrust are in conflict.

One way the author shows how much Ashes loves her father is when she states, in the text, “that winter, it felt like every time I saw my father, the sun cast off just a little more warmth than it had the day before.” I think this shows how, in such a bleak and cold time as winter, her imagination can make everything so much better than a normal day than a day when she’s with her father. All the bad things that are making her unhappy (represented as the snow) are pushed aside by her dad (the sun) who makes her at peace and happy again. Also, all of the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun, therefore making it the center of Ashes’ world. Another example I found of how Ashes loves her dad is when the text states “dad said, ‘you’re the special one, Ashes. You’re the one-in-a-million girl.’ ‘Am I really?’ I asked, not needing the reassurance. I knew I wasn’t a one-in-a-million girl, no matter how often Dad told me I was. But no matter how often he told me, I still loved hearing him say it.” This shows Ashes’ love for her dad by showing how he makes her feel special, feel like he loves her and thinks she’s different from all those other girls. She tells herself it isn’t true, but she loves him for saying it, for knowing that someone believes in her. If she asks him to say it every time, there has to be some part of her that he’s always kept wondering if she really is a one-in-a-million girl. The author shows Ashes’ love for her Dad in many places throughout the book.

           

            One way the author shows how Ashes doesn’t really think she can rely on her father is when Ashes states, while talking about how kind her father can be, “the world might be a better place, but child support checks don’t always show up on time, and I never did get that necklace made of stars.” This shows how, while small things in OTHER people’s lives might be improved by his acts, HER life is just occurring less frequently in his list of good deeds. The necklace, something he promised her when she was little, is now an empty memory, one of many broken promises. When he can’t pay for her childhood, how can she trust him to take care of his old broken promises? Another example I found is after Ashes overheard an argument between her parents about why he called her Ashes. The text states, “when dad forgot to pick me up at school, or didn’t have the money for the class trip, or got all his favorite kinds of Chinese and none of mom’s and mine, I thought maybe mom was right, and dad did call me Ashes just to annoy her.” This shows how when the small things that her dad does that harms her and her mom start piling up, she starts to look at him through her mom’s eyes, seeing the bad inside him. All these things that don’t really seem to matter so much, mean so much more than their actual purpose. Ashes can see how he is almost unable to raise a child, that he can only help one, love one. The author shows how Ashes can’t trust her dad during the story.

            Part of the quandary that Ashes is facing occurs when Ashes has to make a choice that will determine her true feelings for her father. When the father asks Ashes to steal her mother’s money, she has to make a choice, stating whether she trusts her dad enough to know that he will pay her back, or to take it all away, and leave the father empty handed. For many years Ashes has always only thought about these feelings, considering who was in the right, her mother or her father. But when it comes down to Ashes to make a real decision, the right decision, she is clueless. This also shows a change in her feelings towards her father. As shown in the beginning, her father made her day a better one, a brighter one. But now, at the end, as Ashes is shown who her father really is, we, the reader, are shown how she really feels. Her discomfort, her thoughts of betrayal, her feeling of being lost with no one to guide her where there should be two people, all are based upon the money. For example, in the text it states, “ Ten Andrew Jacksons stared right back at me. They offered me no advice on what I should do.” This shows how there is no authority figure to help her, not even the person that the American people are meant to trust, a president. Another example is when the text states, “ I looked out the window and saw only ash gray sky.” In the beginning of the book the sky is always sunny when she was with her father, though it’s all in her imagination. Here the sky represents what the father looks at her to be; Ashes. She saw ONLY ash grey sky, no sun, no storm. She stopped thinking about what she thought of her father and started imagining what he thought of her. A final moment of uncertainty is represented through this moral dilemma about the money.

            In conclusion, if you take the love and hate, and smash them all together until they are fighting for control of opinion, you have what Ashes is going through. During the story, Ashes’ decisions will either oppose her dad or make things better for him. And, without being selfish, she is trying to figure out the option that doesn’t harm her, where unfortunately there are none. Many authors have trouble with balancing such emotions as love and mistrust, especially when it’s between characters with such an emotional connection. Pfeiffer manages to keep the character feeling a perfect balance between the two throughout the story, until it’s the character’s turn to control the balance. She’s dealt with this issue for her entire life, but only in her thoughts, not her actions. When her dad reveals himself to be the man he is, the desperate, troubled, unreliable man her mother left for those very reasons, instead of the good doing, charismatic, self-esteem man she always thought he might be, she has to make a choice no kid, let alone a daughter, should have to make. When I think of love, trust is always hand in hand with it, especially with those held close, like my father. At such an age, I cannot imagine not thinking only of love, not trust, when I think of the people I hold close to me. Is it possible to have a balance between the feelings of love and reliability? That’s what the author is trying to show throughout the entirety of “Ashes”.