Samantha Sanchez on Dinty Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans"

   Dinty W. Moore’s piece “Son of Mr. Green Jeans” was a refreshing examination on the role of fathers and fatherhood. Upon first read-through, I disliked the piece. However I have come to appreciate it more after a closer look during a second perusal. 

Stylistically, Moore took a non-traditional approach in the telling of his story. The majority of the story was not told like a narrative, but rather it was told through a series of vignettes and seemingly unrelated events about father figures. Moore’s approach, though atypical, allowed for the reader to become an investigator forced to find meaning and connectivity among many fragmented vignettes. 

In the entire piece, the only real “hard facts” that Moore gives about his father to the reader comes in just two lines, when he says, “My own Irish father was a newspaperman, owned a popular nightclub, ran for mayor, and smuggled run in a speedboat during Prohibition. He smoked, drank, ate nothing but red meat, and died of a heart attack in 1938” (pg 391). Besides this, the reader must decipher Moore’s feelings on fathers and fatherhood by themselves. 

The piece was interesting because it required the reader to go back and take a second look to really understand what was being said. However, I felt that on the whole, the speaker’s message was muddled under so many vignettes. Furthermore, it was hard to relate to the topic in the first place, but it became even more difficult to connect to it because of all of the side stories. I felt it needed more of a plotline, or a more enforced roadmap, to help guide the reader through to the speaker’s main point. 

Of all the vignettes that Moore displays, the most poignant one arose under the heading “Natural Selection”. Moore writes, “When my wife, Renita, confessed to me her desire to have children, the very first words out of my mouth were ‘You must be crazy’” (pg 392). I loved this scene because of its simplicity, but also because it offered a direct look at the author, his feelings on being a father, and a glimpse at his relationship with his wife. While the fragmented scenes throughout the piece are interesting in their ambiguity, as a reader I felt more appreciative of the moments where I got to see the speaker completely uncloaked.

There were some similarities between “Safekeeping” and “Son of Mr. Green Jeans”. Both of them explored their topics in a non-traditional way. Both of them relied heavily on fragmented ideas and sentences to convey meaning. However “Son of Mr. Green Jeans” differs from every text we have read this semester in the way it examined the theme of fatherhood. The theme was explored first in a short anecdote on Tim Allen, and then by talking about the parental habits of the male Japanese carp, and then by talking about emperor penguins and T.V. personalities. This piece was unique in that each scene was different, though connected through the underlying theme of fatherhood.