A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family Fathers, many fathers,
wish that they could explain themselves to their children,
perhaps most of all to their sons, provide a written record so
that the gossamer connection between themselves and their
progeny might be sustained beyond their lives, and that their
children might be able to return to this written record as a
reminder of who their father was. In A Short Rhetoric for
Leaving the Family, Peter Dimock creates such a letter from a
self-appointed father to his twelve-year-old nephew and a ten-
year-old who is possibly the narrator's half-brother or his
illegitimate son. With the intent that this explanation will
also provide them with a guide to live by teaching them the
forms and methods of classical rhetoric, the narrator's hidden
agenda—reminiscent of Ford Madox Ford's narrator in The Good
Soldier—is to have them turn against his and their family. The
examples that he draws upon for instructing them in rhetoric are
his family's sordid history, particularly t