Chapter Six- A Question of Faith- A Life Without Family

"Hearing this, my father decided that a life without his family was not worth living. When he was finally released, he bought a box of rat poison in Danang and consumed it with a final meal at our house. Fortunately, his hereditary "warrior physique" was stronger than his spirit and the poison only sickened him." In this passage, I thought about how Le Ly's father was so lost without his family that he wanted to take his own life. I thought about the line, "his hereditary 'warrior physique' was stronger that his spirit," and I thought about how lucky it was for him to have survived. I couldn't decide whether I thought about him now as a coward, or as a victim to his family's situation. I think it would have been another significantly tragic moment in Le Ly's life for her so-loved father to commit suicide, but for him to take that strong of an action to say he'd rather have his family than life itself, was a rather beautiful motion. I think overall in the literary work, that Le Ly's father was a round character in the sense that he changed so much from what he was originally and at the beginning of the story. He comes from a background that expects him to have a warrior-like disposition about everything, but eventually he tried to give up by taking his own life. I think that it is very fortunate that his background may have saved his life in this instance. His warrior physique wouldn't put the poison past him as a fatal incident, and that is what saved him from himself and left Le Ly with a father.