The narrator's father believes that the jokes belittle the
people she is writing about and also belittle the type of story-telling he is challenging her to
write.
When he hears the first version of the story, the father's
response is to reference accomplished Russian writers. He mentions Chekov and Turgenev and
implies that they would have written a story that were more serious and
sensible.
The humor in his daughter's story does not fit his sense
of what he has asked her to write.
He asks his daughter to write a "simple story" about
"recognizable people"...
The father is
not against humor, per se, but wants his daughter to write a particular kind
of story that deals directly and simply with the facts of life. He says at one point, "I do not
object to the facts but to people sitting in trees talking
senselessly..."
At the story's end, he questions when his daughter
will face reality, which for him includes the fact of tragedy (and possibly of failure as he
regards his daughter).
This insistence on tragedy as a fact does
not match with the narrator's view of life, nor her view of fiction. She sees the possibility for
a happy ending in her story (and, by implication, for herself). There is a chance that things
will change, importantly, for the better. The present is therefore not an absolute indication of
the future.
Humor, and its play on multiple meanings, is entirely
appropriate for stories written by someone with her
worldview.
The
narrator believes that in both literature and life, a plot that follows "the absolute line
between two points ... takes all hope
away."
Her father sees the present as
a definite indicator of the future, which makes the present, in some cases, a condemnation and a
tragedy. For him, there is no place for humor in a story dealing with this perspective as a
description of reality.
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