The daughter (Peter Bichsel)

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The daughter is a short story by the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel . It appeared in 1964 in the volume Actually Ms. Blum would like to get to know the milkman , a collection of 21 short stories by the author.

content

The short story describes a couple who wait every evening for dinner with their daughter, who works in the city office. In taciturn dialogues and scraps of thought, Bichsel shows the parents that they admire their daughter and at the same time fear losing her. Twice the distance between parents and their child is developed in small details.

The attitude of the father, a simple worker, becomes clear when he speaks respectfully of the "office lady" in his company who pays him his wages. The mother admires the appearance of the daughter, who is taller than her, "also more blond and had the skin, the fine skin of Aunt Maria." Both admire the daughter's abilities, her knowledge of foreign languages ​​and shorthand. The parents try in vain to imagine their daughter's life in the office and in the city.

The gap is widened by changes in the life of the younger generation. Parents try to accept that their daughter is growing up. They admire their knowledge of music and try in vain to imagine what it looks like in the bars where their daughter spends her lunch break.

subjects

The core theme of the short story is communication problems, aggravated by the gap between generations and social differences. Even between the parents there is only a superficial exchange of views, attempts to talk to the daughter about her life fail. The uneventful life of the parents seems entangled in fixed but empty rituals. Since the daughter brings a little color into the life of the parents, the expected departure of the daughter appears as a threat, which the parents have nothing to counter.

“Soon she will take a room in town, they knew that, and that they would eat again at half past six, that their father would read his newspaper again after work, that there would be no more room with a record player, none Hour of waiting more ... "

Applications

Bichsel's little story shows the characteristics of the short story as a prototype and can therefore be found in numerous reading books as an introductory text for this genre. The text also contains numerous so-called blanks. Such open content-related questions give rise to creative further development of the story, to write your own. Wolf Wondratschek has presented such a literary processing with his short story “Lunch Break”. While Bichsel's text illuminates the daughter's life solely from the parents' perspective, Wondratschek shows the daughter's lunch break in a café, dreaming of “catastrophes” that could cause her to be late: men who spoke to her and who she fell in love with .

Texts

  • Peter Bichsel , The Daughter, from: "Actually, Mrs. Blum would like to get to know the milkman", (21 stories), first published in 1964, current edition in Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp) 1993, ISBN 3-518-22125-6
  • Wolf Wondratschek , lunch break, from: The day used to start with a gunshot wound, Munich (Hanser) 1969, pp. 52–53

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