McCorkle’s short story “Fish” is something of a memoir, capturing for the reader particular events in the lives of the narrator and her dying father. While the narrator’s theme is resurrection, her method is memory. The sequence of memories is not strictly chronological, and this story does not pretend to be the narrator’s autobiography. Autobiographies…
Tag: Fish
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Literary Devices
Metaphor Metaphor is a figure of speech in which one subject is described in terms of a dissimilar subject, in order to suggest an analogy. McCorkle uses metaphor directly at the beginning of the story when the narrator describes her father’s “metaphor for life”: “You WERE TERRIFIED of the water, but you loved to step…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Themes
Resurrection Resurrection means to rise from the dead or to revive. Resurrection is the narrator’s primary theme in “Fish.” Many of the narrator’s memories over the course of the story are concerned with little moments in which resurrection has occurred or nearly occurred, for example, the father’s birth a year after his stillborn brother; his…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Characters
Father The narrator has two dreams about her father after he dies. First, she dreams that she has put his limp body on a swing, tying his arms to the chains to hold him in place. She is a kid, and he is wearing a robe and slippers. People pass by and tell her that…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Summary
“Fish” begins with news that a man, sixty-four years old, has just found out that he is dying. The cause—whether cancer or something else—is never given. Family and friends gather to comfort the man, including a woman who nursed him back from pneumonia when he was two years old. She saved him then but cannot…