“Everything we’re doing takes adjusting…Listen I’ve always considered myself a man of routine, not convenience. Routines can be changed. It takes a bit of willpower. I say let’s change our routine. Let’s change our name. We can be whoever we want to be down here. We can all be new people.”
The father makes these remarks after their arrival in Albuquerque. He intends to convince his sons and himself about the essence of modifying their name. For him, the change will be contributory to restarting their lives anew. He employs the routine versus convenience binary to underscore the essence of adopting a new name.
“Bury the bitch.” My father laughed aloud. “I love that.” He asked my brother, “Bury the bitch? See? I told you. Didn’t I tell you, I knew your brother would come around?” My father squeezed my shoulder. “It’s what she gets for messing with us.”
The father assumes the b*tch refers to his ex-wife though the narrator uttered it (b*tch) as a joke. He is impressed by the insult which demeans his ex-wife. He aims at hurting her by having their sons take his side and disrespect her. The father is selfish because he blames her for the divorce when he insinuates that his wife interfered with them.
“The next week the principal called again. I’d been in a fight. I hadn’t been the aggressor, but in her opinion I had provoked the altercation. I’d challenged one of the better basketball players to a game during lunch and beat him bad. Then he hit me in the stomach. I was new, the principal told my father, so she was concerned. Another fight and she would have to suspend me.”
Fights are indicators of indiscipline; the principal is biased for laying blame on the narrator considering that he is not fully responsible for the fight. Being new at the school puts the narrator at a disadvantage and it later leads to problems with his father.
