Arm Wrestling With My Father Analysis

Brad Manning’s “Arm Wrestling with My Father” and Sarah Vowell’s “Shooting Dad” are two readings that are similar in topic but are presented in different ways. Manning describes his relationship with his father was a physical relationship. Vowell describes her relationship with her father as more political. In both Brad Manning’s and Sarah Vowell’s essays, they both had struggled to connect with their fathers at an early age and both come to a realization that their fathers aren’t immortal.

To begin with, Manning and Vowell experience the same struggles when they were younger referring their fathers. Manning presents that he enjoyed his father’s physical attributes when he was young. This is shown when Manning says “That was the way I felt for number of years during my teens, after I had lost my enjoyment of arm wrestling and before I had given up that same intense desire to beat my father” (138). Manning describes how it was fun for him to compete with his father

Vowel found herself again disbanded from the family as they bonded through conservative activities without her. Lastly, as Manning was growing into a teenager, he became oblivious to care if he was to become his father after not being able to communicate with him to this point in his life. Manning states in the text, “I am becoming less my father and more myself” (139). He no longer feels as if he need to physically compete with his father. His mental strength was enough for his own approval and not his father’s. Vowell wraps up her communication woes by explaining that her and her father had argued about everything politically until she moved away. Blaming everything that happened on her father’s conservative views, and her father firing back on what would happen if her views were put into action. (This would be during the cold war) Manning and Vowell though their years of living under the same roof of their fathers were tough to communicate between each