51 pages • 1 hour read
Grace PaleyA Conversation with My Father
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Exam Answer Key
Multiple Choice
1. B (Paragraph 7)
2. D (Various paragraphs)
3. C (Various paragraphs)
4. A (Paragraph 5)
5. D (Paragraph 46 and various paragraphs)
6. A (Paragraph 7 and various paragraphs)
7. C (Paragraph 29)
8. C (Paragraph 21)
9. D (Paragraph 51)
Long Answer
1. The father objects to his daughter’s story because he believes that she refuses to tell a simple story with “plain tragedy” at the end. (Paragraph 42) The father is of a generation in which mistakes like those the characters in the story make would have been enough to damage their future lives. For this reason, he is opposed to the woman in the story having an undefined, and therefore not clearly tragic, ending. (Various paragraphs)
2. Grace Paley may have chosen to omit the characters’ names to make the connection to herself and her own father clearer. The father, who sees Russian authors as forming the core of literature, seems similar to Paley’s own father, who emigrated to the United States from Ukraine. (Paragraph 7) Additionally, the anonymous nature of the conversation may add to the Intergenerational Conflict, as it seems to be not just a conflict between a specific father and daughter, but between representatives of two generations. (Various paragraphs)
