Impossible Reconciliations in Richard Ford's 'Reunion'

Résumé 0

Richard Ford's title "Reunion" serves as our Ariadne's thread into the eponymous short story, its paradoxical dimension pointing to the author's attempt at mystification. The purpose of the article is to break free from the author's interpretative guidance in order to unravel his deceitful textual weaving. Using the term "reconciliation" as a variant of "reunion" because it allows for more abstract developments - bringing together contradictory ideas or facts, making them "compatible or consistent" -, we contend that impossible reconciliation proves to be, beyond the diegesis itself, the defining mode of the short story, torn by omnipresent contradictory forces. Whereas the term "reunion" expresses a movement toward another point, a tightening effect of convergence, a centripetal drive, the short story seems to be first and foremost the locus of centrifugal forces, be it at the level of the diegesis, of the discourse, and finally of the text itself as a literary entity. These three levels provide the axes of the analysis.