A Burden and a Reward: The Father Figure in John Fante's Narrative

Abstract This article analyzes how father figures change over the long literary production of John Fante, from such early works as Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) and “The Odyssey of a Wop” (1933) to later works like The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In them, father figures assume different, but always central, meanings. They are portrayed as sources of ethnic shame in the first years of Fante's career; alternatively, fathers are ancestors to embrace, especially so after the 1950s, when Fante himself was aging, his biological father had passed away, and Italian Americans started to be perceived differently in the US. In both cases, and even when they are symbolically absent like in the novel Ask the Dust (1939), fathers are here understood as symptoms of Fante's attempt to negotiate a position within American letters, playing the part of the ethnic writer. In this sense, Italian father figures constitute a paradox: to Italian American literary sons, they are disturbing, something to contest in their path toward Americanization; yet they are also the main source of the writer's literary achievement, a never-ending reserve of literary material that has contributed enormously to carve Fante's place in American and Italian American letters.