“Independence Day” by Richard Ford (post 2): Frank Bascombe thinks 15-year-old son is having emotional problems due to conflict between “two selves”

Richard Ford’s Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.

In Chapter One, the first-person narrator, Frank Bascombe, who is divorced, is concerned that his son, Paul, who lives with his remarried mother, is having serious problems: shoplifting and assault. Frank plans to spend father-son time with Paul on the Independence Day, 4th of July, holiday.

Frank’s formulation of the psychological basis for his son’s problems includes the following:

“…one little outer character tries to make friends with or exert control over another, submerged, one, but can’t” (1, p. 14).

“My fatherly job…to coax by some middleman’s charm his [son’s] two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship—like separate, angry nations seeking one government—and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future” (1, p. 15).

This would be a sound, therapeutic approach to stabilize multiple personality. Is Frank basing his formulation and solution of his son’s problems on his own personal experience? Are these issues a reflection of the author’s?

1. Richard Ford. Independence Day. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.