“My Side of the Story”
By Adam Bagdasarian
The conflict in the story is external of the protagonist and is conflict with another character, his dad.
The author shows this conflict through a series of speech made by the main character and the father:
(Paragraph 27) “You came running in here without knocking because Skip put Scotch tape on your head?”
“No, I—”
“You didn’t care that the door was closed? You didn’t care that your mother might have been sleeping?”
The text above shows how the father doesn’t see sibling disagreements as a problem and sees going in uninvited more of a problem. The author also shows how when the father was raging, he couldn’t listen in on anything and was stubborn on his own opinion by writing a description of what was happening,
(Paragraph 31) “Is that what you do? You run into rooms screaming?” He was on his feet now and advancing
toward me. “You don’t knock?”
“No. Yes.”
At this point my brother entered the room, saw what was happening, and stood transfixed.
The above text describes the father, but does not link to the title, My Side of the Story. The author included some important quotations to express how his side of the story was not brought to justice. This is shown by the author at the end of the story, paragraph 47, “Obviously, when I burst into my
mother’s room, I had entered a larger world of justice, a world where screaming, whining,
mother dependence, not knocking on closed doors, and startling one’s father were serious
crimes. That part I understood. The part I didn’t understand was the part about why my
brother, who had started the whole thing by putting Scotch tape on my head, hadn’t been
punished.”
The author links the conflict to the title of the story by using the father as a metaphor for the larger world, where justice is not always seen, and his mother, described in paragraph 9 as, “It had lovely brown hair, a warm enchanting smile, and a soft, understanding voice.” Looking at the title of the story, we can see that his side of the story, where he went for the “Smaller justice” (Paragraph 47) but accidentally faced the “Bigger justice” Therefore not getting what he wanted.
My Poem shows the concept of the conflict by showing how the conflict was introduced and then how eventually the story reached the climax, where the father started yelling at the protagonist, and then after the falling action, the main character realizes how he “Steps into a larger world of justice.”
