Read the text and answer the following questions.

we had goldfish and they circled around and around

in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, “be happy Henry!”
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.

my mother, poor fish,

wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?”

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,

they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled
A Smile to Remember, Charles Bukowski

Questions for critical thinking:

1. What’s the genre of the extract? Provide arguments supporting your answer.
2. Explain the association between the mother and the goldfish.
3. Comment on the attitude of the writer both when he had the goldfish and when he wrote
the extract.
4. Give a definition of the words in bold.
Context: Charles Bukowski is a German-American poet, story-writer and columnist who had written
thousands of poem and short stories in the dirty realism literary movement. His poems were later
published in 60 books. Bukowski writes poems about the lives of the poor Americans, relationships,
women, which are partially influenced by the socio-political environment of his resident-city Los
Angeles. He gives brilliant imagery at the crude level, where there are no appropriations or censoring
of his ideas and thoughts.
The poet has used paradoxes in this poem to express is thoughts about a home where the mother gets
beaten by the father atleast thrice a week, yet she smiles and asks the son to smile and be happy too.
The poet uses goldfish as a metaphor for the mother, as he wanted to express that like the fish, the
mother is unable to express her feelings or thoughts. She is unable to speak out what is going in her
mind, or what she is undergoing.
The poet has written this poem to show the normal house-hold of poor people in Los Angeles, where
violence is a normal phenomenon in their families, and the children had to witness it. The household
becomes a mess and the women in the house cannot express themselves or the things that they have
been going through.

The fathers are violent, but they don’t know themselves what makes them an animal. It could be the
problems that they go through outside the house: recession, no jobs, no money, etc. But they take all
their frustration and anger out in form of blows on their wife and children when they reach home.
They are helpless themselves that they have turned into monsters and they have no control over it.
The poet has given a beautiful description of a dysfunctional household about domestic violence and
children in the household. The poem provides beautiful imagery of the thoughts and views of a child
who has been seeing his mother forcing him to be happy, when she is not happy herself. Even when
she smiles, sadness pours out of her eyes.
Rhyme Scheme and Structure: In this poem, there are no rhyming schemes and patterns which is
seen; the poet has written the poem free of any structure like that,and has broken the sentences in a
way that the flow of emotions are seen in the poem. The flow of expressions is apt and helps the
readers to understand what the reader meant to say. For example:

my mother, always smiling, wanting us

all
to be happy, told me, ‘be happy Henry!’

and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you

can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while

raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t

understand what was attacking him from within.

The poet has used punctuation marks to arrange the pauses and stops in the poem, which helps the
poet to channelize the flow of expressions in the poem, and helps the readers to understand the
expression of the poet. This is an efficient way of capturing the exact feelings and expressions of the
poet in the poem.

The poet has repeatedly mentioned how the mother wanted her son to be happy, which shows how the
mother was restless and worried that her life and condition at home is affecting his psychology, and
she kept asking him to be cheerful. She even tried to show him how to smile, but the poet saw only
sadness and unhappiness in her smile. The pot has written this poem from the perspective of a small
boy, who witnesses his father beating his mother, and his mother still pretending to be unaffected, and
smiling at him, ad asking him to be happy too.
Theme: The theme of this poem is dirty realism and imagery, where the poet has used beautiful
paradoxes to express how it feels for a child to be in a house where domestic violence is a common
thing. The poet has chosen a child’s perspective to show how it feels to grow up in a house where
your mother is beaten up by your father, and she just cannot do anything. Burkowski uses the goldfish
as a paradox and metaphor to describe the mother and her nature of keeping quiet and hiding her pain
behind her smile. The father is a man who takes his frustration and aggression out on the mother, and
he himself doesn’t realize what makes him the monster. This poem provides an insight of a small boy
who sees an unhappy environment around him, and is unable to do anything. But he watches his
mother asking him to smile and be happy, which he is unable to do. He just wonders how his mother
is expecting him to smile and be happy, when she is in pain and suffering herself.
Deep Meaning: If you ponder upon the deep meaning of the poem, the socio-economic conditions of
the society affecting the household and families in the domestic level is highlighted. The poet tries to
show how it feels to grow up in a house where one parent beats the other one, and there is nothing
that could be done other than being silent about it. The mother loves her son, and she urges him to
keep smiling and be happy. The mother is like the goldfish they had in their house, which died. Fish
cannot express their pain and suffering to the human eyes, and his mother is going through similar
things.