This assignment is pretty fun since the story is not only interesting, but very relevant to Freud’s Family Romance. We can see that the boy whose name is Colonel Sartoris Snopes hates his father from most of the story. He calls his father as “our enemy” and says that “He aims for me to lie…again with that frantic grief and despair.” The boy also describes his father as an incompetent and ignoble person by mentioning that “the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp” and “If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again.” The boy does do whatever his father orders because he is quite afraid of his father’s physical force. It shows family romance as the any event which make him feel dissatisfied afford him provocation for beginning to criticize his father, in order to support his critical attitude. The knowledge which he has acquired that other parents are in some respects preferable to them. (Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works)

He also hates his sisters a lot. In contrast, he describes his mother as a weak and nice person. We can see that his mother cares about the boy a lot whenever he gets a hurt. This relationship among the boy and family also expresses the family romance that the boy has no hesitation in attributing to his mother as many fictitious love-affairs as he himself has competitors while his sisters are eliminated by being bastardized.

However, boy respects his father and believes that his father is brave after he escapes his family at the end of the story. And it tells a mature part of family romance that he puts effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of his longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed the noblest and strongest.