Assignment 1

Alan Lam
August 19, 2014
ENGL 4321: Modern Canadian Fiction

Connections and Reflections between Parent and Child Relationships in

Duncan Campbell’s The Desjardins and Charles Roberts’ Do Seek their Meat from God

The connection between a parent and child is often a key theme to inducing empathy in a

reader, such as the one between Charles and his father in Duncan Campbell’s The Desjardins, and the

unnamed father and little boy in Charles Roberts’ Do Seek their Meat from God. This is such in the

following two cases, where in the first short story the impending madness in Charles is foreshadowed by

his father’s demise, while second story the little boy’s innate reliance to his father compares to the

dependency of the cubs to their parents. The use of realism examines the intricate workings between

familial bonds, which is done by Campbell through the Desjardins family and is compared across species

of humans and panthers by Roberts in Do Seek Their Meat From God.

In The Desjardins, the initial mystery behind the death of the Isidore Desjardins causes great

concern, as an immediate ominous tone is set for the future of the Desjardins children. By comparing

the innate relationships between children and their parents, how Adele “looked like her father” and

“took after him” (Campbell 25), as well as how Philippe’s personality takes after his father by assuming

the responsibility of “look[ing] after things”(25), Campbell lays out the nature of offspring to follow the

footsteps of their parents both physically and mentally. This foreshadows Charles slow descent into

chaos, as he envelops himself the writings of Napoleon, and becomes “lost in deep reveries, swallowed

of ambitious dreams”(26). The mental deterioration of Charles is one that should not come as a total

surprise to the audience.

 Through the same parent-child relationship, a reversal occurs in which characteristics of the

children gives insight to the parents. When Philippe realizes that Charles is descending into madness, he

exclaims that “ we must cut ourselves off, we must be the last of our race” (26). The unnatural coldness

and unsocial nature of their father Isidore is now illuminated, as it was likely that he was not a cold-

hearted individual as portrayed by society but selfless such that he avoided afflicting others as he

struggled helpless against his mental disease.

In Do Seek Their Meat From God, the relationship between the father and child reflects the

similar relationship between the panthers and their cubs. Using realism describing the instinctive nature

of parents to feed and protect their young, such as the priority of the mother panther to “those small

blind cubs at home to nourish, who soon must suffer any lack of hers” (Roberts 19), is compared and

contrasted to those of the father, as when he “thought of his own little one left in such a position” of

danger, alone in the woods, and “straight away his heart melted” (20). When “he remembered how near

he had been to disregarding the far-off cries, and great beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead”

(23), we begin to empathize the settler’s predicament.

However, an unlucky clash of fate occurs, as the objectives of the settlers is opposite and

conflicts with the objectives of the panthers. By personifying the panthers and their protective parental

instincts for their cubs creates empathy, as the cries of the child causes the panthers to be “fired with

fierce hope”(18) of finding much deserved nourishment. Once the settler resolves the conflict and kills

the beasts, as “the panther’s body collapsed all at once, a dead weight which he easily flung aside”(22),

Roberts creates a final contrast and an end to the juxtaposition, as the fate of the cubs as well as the

fate of the child is finally determined. The battle between man and beast is once again resolved,

however leaving the audience dismayed when the settler finds “dead bodies, now rapidly decaying, of

two small panther cubs” (23).

 In The Desjardins by Duncan Campbell, the trials and tribulations within the family which tests

familial bonds can be seen in Charles mental deterioration. Charles descent into madness is one

foreshadowed by his father’s mysterious death, as Isidore’s unsociable behavior portrayed by the

community starkly contrasts how sociable the children were amongst themselves, which hints towards

an ulterior reason to Isidore’s actions. The family’s struggle in cutting themselves off from society due to

the mental illness that stems within their family is one that Isidore most likely passed on to his children.

However, in Do Seek their Meat From God by Charles Roberts, the battle does not test family bonds

within a family, but between families across species, as the settler’s objective to protecting his son from

the panther’s hunt for necessary nourishment for their cubs depicts the inevitable and unavoidable

conflict of two different resolutions that is an essential component of our natural world. These two very

different approaches which examines bonds between parents and their offspring are only snippets of

what is the multi-leveled complex of what makes a family unit.

Works Cited

Campbell, Duncan. “The Desjardins.” Reprinted in The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English.

Eds. Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver. Toronto: OUP, 1988. 24-28.

Roberts, Charles G. D. “Do Seek Their Meat From God.” Reprinted in The Oxford Book of Canadian Short

Stories in English. Eds. Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver. Toronto: OUP, 1988. 19–23.