SHAVING

“Shaving” is a story told from the third person point of view in wich Leslie Norris desccribes one day of a dying man’s life and his son’s, Barry.   

By the way he tells father’s story, you can remark how strong Barry’s image is compared with his boyhood and also with his father’s. In his seventeens now, Barry changed. Time transformed him, being a tall strongly built boy now. He smiles, remembering of his childhood and goes on, being “bigger than most men”.
    

Not only does Leslie Norris use physical description but moral one as well. You can easily observe the boy’s opinion about himself: “He flexed his shoulders against the tightness of his jacket and was surprised again by the unexpected weight of his muscles, the thickening strength of his body. A few years back, he thought, he had been a small, unimportant boy, one of a swarming gang laughing and jostling to school, hardly aware that he possessed any identity. But time had transformed him. He walked solidly now, and often alone.”
  

Arriving home, he is supposed to shave his father, old and powerless. His hands are “firm and broad”. The fingers are short and strong, “the little fingers slightly crooked, and soft dark hair grew on the backs of his hands and his fingers just 
above the knuckles.”

Barry’s care and expertise of the ritual of shaving shows the process as he became an adult. But this is caused not only for the boy’s caring after his father’s needs, but for his memories from childhood.

Reading this, you can observe how people can change at any age. For me, I think even though Barry becomes an adult, there takes place his rebirth, reported in the third view point.

Written By Olivia Cojocaru