easy · Enhanced ACT reading
A literary narrator reflects: "I had always thought my father's silences were a wall he built against us. It was not until I packed his study that I understood: a man who has spent thirty years deciding which truths would wound his children, and withholding them, does not build a wall but carries one. The silence I had resented as exclusion had been, all along, a kind of labor done on my behalf."
The shift in the narrator's understanding is best described as a movement from seeing the father's silence as:
- a barrier that shut the narrator out to seeing it as an effort the father sustained for the narrator's protection.
- a sign of the father's indifference to seeing it as evidence of his secret resentment of the family.
- a deliberate cruelty to seeing it as an unconscious habit the father had simply never learned to control.
- a temporary estrangement to seeing it as a permanent rupture that packing up his late father's study finally confirmed.
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