Florianne
At some point in life everyone breaks away from one another. When someone leaves you behind it can create emptiness and loneliness and it will always be easier for some than for others to handle the feelings that can occur. The short story Florianne by Daniel Woodrell is a fascinating story showing, from a father’s perspective, what a father goes through when his daughter becomes a teenager.
On the surface Florianne is about a father, Henry, being upset because his daughter, Florianne, is missing. He worries that someone has taken his daughter. Throughout the story he tries to find her and is constantly suspecting everyone around him to have kidnapped her (p.40, l.21). The narrator is being worried about his daughter and blames his surroundings for the loss.
In the ending of the story the father recollects the memories of the missing daughter’s mother. The girl’s mother left the father and daughter years ago. The mother gave several reasons for leaving the father, among was that he was too much the same day in and day out: “I was too steady for her taste, too regular, too much the same one day to another.” Irrespective of age almost everyone in some point in life breaks away from someone close to them to form and create their own life.
The loss of the narrators daughter begun before she went missing. On page 42 there is a description of his daughters transformation from a girl to a teenager: “That meant so much to her, to finally have a figure clothes looked good on, to feel a little admired when lolling around the pool in town, wear shorts to the ballpark on summer nights” (p.42, l.9). The main theme in this short story is therefore not about a kidnapped girl, but about a father’s feelings of loss of his daughter due to the natural transformation child to teenager. It can be hard for parents to realize that their children don’t need them in the same