Father-Absence in Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Abstract

Fathers occupy a serious role in adolescents’ development. The psychological effect of a father’s absence to his family deters development of offspring from early childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood. Thus, the present paper is concerned with one type of the disrupted families, the father-absent family. This plentiful and complicated theme, in relation to the psychological and behavioral development of children and adolescents, is central in Anne Tyler’s most legendary novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982). Accordingly, the aim of this study is to probe the dynamics of the dysfunctional family in Tyler’s novel focusing on the psychological aftermaths of the sudden abandonment of the father and living in a mother-headed family on the development of the adolescent son, Cody. A contextual understanding of family-systems theory (FST), literature on sudden, unexpected events, father-absence and mother-headed families guided this study. Accordingly, the case study provides the opportunity to answer the following questions: To what extent father absence has any unique behavioral and psychological effects upon adolescents in this family and what are the psychological outcomes of the sudden, unexpected departure of a father on the solo mother.