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The Construction of Lies: The Novel vs. The Play

Why is Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body A Novel? 

The father-daughter relationship between Yumi and her father, Lloyd, is an interesting clue which went through the whole novel. When Yumi was a small girl, their relationship (a lovely daughter and a caring father) was just as normal as a father-daughter relationship could be. And the conflict between them began when Yumi started to “dressed like a begger”. (p.20) Then Yumi act far and far from her father’s expectation. And when Lloyd found the affair of bYumi and the history teacher, Yumi made the decision to run away.

In the novel "All Over Creation” by Ruth Ozeki, the parent’s relationship with Yumi is different from the relationship in Getting mother’s body. Which the parenting relationship cast different significant impacts on the character’s life and shape them into different identities when they grew up.

One Big Flow, But Not For The Farmers

In All Over Creation the character’s express a relationship to the environment based on both belief and necessity. There is a divide between farmers making choices out of immediate necessity and those on the outside who can approach the environment with more philosophy.

GM seeds offer farmers a way out of using pesticides and they embrace them out of necessity. Lloyd tells the Seeds:

            Among all the characters in the book All Over Creation, I view Phoenix as the most typical and impressive role played in the novel. He is neither in his sister’s age, nor a mature adult. Too kiddish will be too bewildered on what to change, too adultlike will be too stubborn to change, but he is the transition from a child to an adult, so he is one of the most outstanding characters in the novel showing how identity self-consciously shifts in respond to shifting environments.

No two characters could appear more different than Lloyd and Yumi, Ruth Ozecki’s father-daughter duo at the center of her novel All Over Creation. Lloyd, a small-town Idaho farmer, holds very strong conservative views and religious beliefs, while his daughter, a runaway at fourteen and now the mother of three children, all with different fathers, is incredibly progressive and open in her values and way of life. When Yumi returns to her hometown upon news that her father is ill, it becomes evident that although these two characters think and differently, they often end up acting in alignment with each other’s beliefs rather than with their own.

Responsive parenting plays a major role in children’s development of cognitive and social skills. It shapes the growth and development of the child considering the various frameworks involved (social, cultural, educational) and not compromising any single one of them. Well, most of us can lose count of the number of times either your mother or father whipped you hard due to uncouthly behaviour. Looking closely in All Over Creation, responsive parenting was wanting in Lloyd Fuller’s household.

Identity, Environment, and Ownership

 Who is Yumi Fuller? Who is she to the people around her and herself? Yumi’s experience in the subtly racist Idaho as the sole Asian student forces her to take a look into the environment that has helped to shape who she is. While Yumi is not solely defined by her childhood and the people there, the influence and their reactions to the differences between Yumi and the other townsfolk help to direct Yumi towards discovering who she is. By experiencing the various events occurring around her, some of which are fueled by ignorance and others a desire for the exotic, the readers are able to understand the influences the town had on Yumi.