Essay Workshop 3

Smoke Signals Essay 3

To forgive someone is the process of letting go of resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake they have made without demanding punishment or restitution. We are taught as children to ask for forgiveness and to forgive those who have harmed us. It’s only when we forgive that we are able to receive forgiveness from ourselves and others. The question is who do we forgive and for what offenses? In “Smoke Signals” Victor travels a path to forgiveness. This path is filled with memories, regrets, realizations and forgiveness.
Memories are tricky things. They are colored by our perception of what occurred, what other people tell us happened and can change over time. Victor’s memories of his early childhood have shaped him into a young man filled with anger and a sense of being treated unfairly. As the story unfolds we find that Victor and Thomas remember their childhood differently. As Thomas and Victor start their journey Victor is filled with memories of his father. Thomas serves as a catalyst, sharing his own version of what he remembers. One of Victor’s first memories is of the fire that took the lives of Thomas’s parents. Thomas sees Victors father as the man who saved him, but Victor sees his father as the man that did not come back for him. It was after the fire that Victor remembers his father changing; he cut his hair and began leaving a little each day.
As the story unfolds Victor begins to remember things, snap shots of his childhood. One of these was a time he shared with his father laughing and teasing that ended with his father hitting him after he spilled beer in the truck. Another was the morning after watching his father and mother drinking when he threw all the remaining beer bottles at his father’s truck. As a young child Victor was fighting against the affects that living with a drinker can have on a child. He was losing faith in his father and becoming withdrawn.
Hurtful words can fill us with regret when we lose someone close to us. Words that are easily said in anger may linger for years causing family members to not bond with one another. Words are powerful things and can sometimes hurt us more than any physical injury. When a child lives with a parent or parents that have a drinking problem they see good times and bad times. Not knowing what to expect at any given time makes them become guarded. One memory that Victor had was of his father asking him who he looked up to. Victor did not answer, thus hurting not only his father but himself. When Victor’s father left the family, although disillusioned, his son pleaded with him not to go.
As the boys travel together Thomas reminds Victor that his father had been leaving for a long time, that he had wanted to disappear long before he actually drove away. As Victor grew older I think that he regretted not doing more with his father. He had let his anger over his father not saving him, but saving Thomas during the fire when they were children, interfere with their relationship. This perceived injustice became Victor’s way of dealing with the feelings he had for his father.
While he headed toward his fathers last residence Victor begins to realize that he has let his family situation color the way he looks at life. Growing up on the reservation where poverty and isolation was an everyday fact of life Victor had become hardened. He told Thomas that Indians needed to be stoic. That they needed to dress a certain way, wear their hair long and loose and look mean so that the white man would respect them. Victor’s mother was a giving woman who accepted help learned from others. After his father left she quit drinking and devoted herself to giving her son a better life. Thomas told Victor that he was unapproachable and that he had cut himself off from his mother long before they started the journey. When the boys started their trip Victor’s mother made him promise to come back to her. It was as if she agreed with Thomas.
After meeting Suzy Victor begins to have some insight into his father’s life. He discovered that his father regretted leaving his family and that he always intended to come back. Suzy told Victor that his father quit drinking and that he was a good and caring friend to her. Victor’s father had told her stories about his son always portraying him as a bigger character then he was. He was proud of his son. Suzy tells Victor that his father told her he had started the fire that took the lives of Thomas’s parents and it was the guilt over that that had made him drink more and leave his family. Suzy encourages Victor to look through his father’s trailer and find closure. When Victor finds an old family photo that his father kept with the word Home written on the back he cuts his own hair out of respect for his father, following the traditions of his culture, and burns down the trailer. Victor realizes that his father loved him and that it was not his fault that he left.
Smoke Signals is a story about the journey that Victor goes on which is filled with memories, regrets, realizations and forgiveness. The road trip that Victor and Thomas went on was a symbolic trip into Victors past. Thomas was a storyteller and through his stories he helped Victor reach out for memories of his father, who he was and what he meant to his son. To forgive an injustice we feel has been done to us is not an easy thing to do. It is, how ever something we need to do more for ourselves then for others. In Smoke Signals Victor needs to forgive his father for not being the one who saved him from the fire, for drinking too much, for hitting him and for leaving. When he is able to let these things go Victor remembers how much he loved his father and that he was loved in return.
With this journey Victor takes the first steps into a new part of his life releasing those old thoughts and hurts that he had carried with him for years. Victor finds the father he longed for and the ability to accept that he could not change things that happened when he was a child. As the journey ends Victor remembers his father, the good and bad things that happened in his childhood and he begins to understand his path. As he releases his father’s ashes into the river he also releases his anger and embraces his loss. At the end of the story Thomas ask, “when do we forgive our fathers and for what.” For Victor to forgive his father and to try to understand the man he was, gave him the opportunity to open his heart and live his own life.