Living by Perfection

A detailed Summary of Living by Perfection

In Stephanie Vaughn's narrative "Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog" the title is a controlling metaphor for the father's mentality on life. He believes if he lives in a precise and perfect manner, mimicking the meticulousness of the phonetic alphabet, his life will be perfect. However, in a moment of imprecision, he loses his perfect life. In the events thereafter, his inability to adjust his manner and adapt to a new life cause him to fail. Ultimately, the father thinks he can create an ideal life by living by a code and ignores the fact that life requires one to make exceptions in specific circumstances.

Gemma sees her father exemplifying a calculated life. He always walks home via the most mathematically efficient path, in "a diagonal that would cut the parade ground into perfect triangles" (612) despite raging snowstorms. When on of the billowing gusts veers him off of his path, and he can only wonder naively "exactly where [he] miscalculated the velocities, how [he] misjudged the vectors" (613). Through his actions, Gemma's father implies that life is perfect and can be predicted, and if he acts in a deliberate and exact way, he will obtain the expected outcome.

When the situation arises that the father does loose control and insults a general, his perfect world begins to dissipate. The army gives him "a 7 instead of a 9 on his Efficiency Report" (620) and he doesn't receive his promotion. Since he lives with the idea that life can be perfect, Gemma's father cannot deal with this imperfection. Thus, he resigns from the army, and starts a life as a civilian. However, this action forces him to deal with a much more chaotic world than the one he experienced in the army. The father's character refuses to adjust and remains as the man who taught Gemma to speak in complete and precise sentence even though he is "incongruous among the reds, yellows, and blues that the previous owner had used to decorate the office" (621).

The inability of Gemma's father to adapt to a new way of life, one which recognizes the imperfection and incalculability of life, causes him to waste the rest of his life. Instead of being flexible and interacting with unpredictable situations, he focuses his life on trivial details that he believes he can control. He continues his attempt to teach Gemma of this exactness by telling her "about the techniques the E

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Approximate Word count = 799
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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Living by Perfection

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