Creative nonfiction is when writers utilize their imagination to illustrate intellectual and artistic creativity while maintaining the factual integrity of the work (Gutkind, 2004). What makes creative nonfiction different from other forms of nonfiction is that its prose style is intended to entertain readers. The creative nonfiction piece of concern to this analysis is I Survived the Blizzard of ’79 by Beth Ann Fennelly. At the beginning, Fennelly saw her father as an ideal role model. He was an ordinary catholic who obeyed all the church rules.
When the father willingly gave his scarf, Fennelly thought of him as loving. However, these good views shattered after she heard the late-night argument between her parents in which the mother questioned their father’s act of dragging the children to church in a blizzard (Fennelly, 2012). Fennelly began to see how Catholicism made her father rigid and caused additional restrictions in their house. She also realized that it was their father’s duty to dress them in scarves if he knew they were going to walk two miles in the blizzard.
The scarf represents parental failure and its lifelong influence on the children. In the process of promoting Catholicism, the father exposed his children to extreme cold, made them see deaths caused by the blizzard and they were not spared from their parents’ argument. These evens ripped of the child’s innocence. Fennelly began to see faults in her father. The act of giving the scarf should have created a lasting fond memory (Fennelly, 2012) but looking back, it exposes his father’s carelessness.
Children often feel safe around their parents and consider every actions taken by these adults as wise, true, just and originating from divine intelligence. When the child reaches a point where they realize this is not always the case, the high regards they had for the parent crashes. The child’s world cannot be whole anymore, and have to accommodate some aches in their growing. This also explains why people get nervous about being parents. They fear that their mistakes will hurt their children and paint an imperfect picture of them in the children’s memories. People have seen their parents as flawed and fear their children will do the same.
