I found the story Four Summers to be a very odd and different piece. I thought
it was a very true and realistic story, but the way it was told threw me off a
little. The believable part of the story is how it relates to family life. Many
children grow up thinking about how different their lives will be when they are
adults, but it just doesn’t work that way. No matter how hard you may try, you
will end up similar to your parents, be it language, activities, or the
lifestyle in general. Throughout her childhood, Sissie seemed to despise the bar
and did not want anything to do with it. She also had a tough time deciding
whether or not she liked her father. When she grew up, she married a man that
was quite similar to her own father. Jesse was a big guy, he enjoyed the bar
scene, and he drank beer. Those are characteristics of Sissie’s father. The
family cycle lives on yet another generation and will probably keep going until
someone makes an active effort to cease that type of behavior. The stranger
Sissie met as a fourteen year-old is the only thing I didn’t understand. Why
was that such a significant thing for her when she came back to the bar with
Jesse? The only conclusion I can make is that the stranger would have been the
one to break the cycle with Sissie. That doesn’t seem likely though, as he was
in the bar in the first place, and he was in it when she returned several years
later. I didn’t really like reading this story because of the manner in which
it was written. It was different, but not easy to decipher at draw conclusions
from.