Alcohisms Culprit

Alcoholism’s culprit..

In the passage “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders uses metaphors and comparisons to describe his father’s drinking, and the connection of his excessive working and compares those two addictions. First, he talks in detail about his father’s constant abuse of alcohol, with emphases on the transformation his father made every time he drank. I share the same understanding as Sanders, because my Father drank excessively all my life. All the violent, scary instances Sanders shared in his story seemed like he was telling the story of my life experiences with an alcoholic father. The examples from Sanders' narrative gave me a new perspective of how much my father let alcohol destroy the whole family, and how, like Sanders' father, my father's life revolved around the next drink he was going to have. Both of our fathers' demeanors would completely change after they consumed an alcoholic beverage.

One of the metaphors in which Sanders illustrates his father’s compulsive consumption of alcohol in this passage “I use the past tense not because he never quit drinking but because he quit living” (100). In this quote, Sanders emphasized how the daily necessity of his father’s alcohol use began to ruin his life. He forgot how to live without depending on alcohol. Life was no longer enjoyable as it began revolving around getting the next glass of liquor. I relate so much to this quote, because even as a young child I could feel the atmosphere change once my father got that first drink in him. The end of the quote where he states that he quit living is what really impacted me. It wasn’t because my father had died, but because my father would repeatedly tell me the alcohol was the only thing that would make him happy at the end of the day. He would come home from work and before he even unloaded his work van he was pushing back the liquor.

Sander’s use of figurative language to describe his father’s drinking is successful in demonstrating...