Kokoro Lesson Plan

Analyze the emotional impact of the beginning of Chapter 2, when the narrator first returns home. How does the narrative bring about this emotional poignancy?

The beginning of the chapter, in which the narrator returns home after graduation with his crumpled diploma, is a particularly emotionally poignant scene. Considering his father's pride in his graduation effusive and indicative of a lack of worldly knowledge, the narrator complains that "I began at last to dislike my father's naive provincialism."

However, his mother's and father's simple explanation that perhaps his father, in his aged and ailing state, took some of the pride as consolation for himself stuns the...