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Sounder: Like Father Like Dog - Papers Online

Sounder: Like Father Like Dog

William H. Armstrong’s novel, Sounder, depicts the life of a poor black family and their dog around the turn of the twentieth century. The family of five consists of the mother, father, two sons, one daughter, and last but not least their dog Sounder. The family relies on sharecropping in the summer and hunting in the winter for their food supply. One extremely frigid and windy winter, the hunting is so poor that the father resorts to stealing a ham to keep his family fed. As a result of his decision to steal, the sheriff comes and arrests the father and Sounder is brutally shot. This sets up the rest of the story in which the author creates many parallels between Sounder and the ...

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When his punishment comes he takes it like a man and goes off to prison. Sounder demonstrates his own courage by taking a shotgun blast to the face while trying to prevent his master from being taken away to prison. Wounded and approaching death, Sounder treks off into the wooded marsh to heal himself with the acid from the oak-tree leaves. The heroic actions of both the father and Sounder perfectly demonstrate the strength they possess to carry on in a life of hardship, day after day.
Armstrong utilizes the boy’s thoughts to exemplify not only the mental strength of the father and Sounder, but their physical strength as well. The boy describes Sounder as having “great square jaws and head, a muscular neck and broad chest that showed his bulldog blood”(4). When an animal was shaken from a tree “Sounder would clamp and set his jaw-vise just behind the animals head. Then would spread his front paws, lock his shoulder joints, and let the bulging neck muscles fly from left to ...

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Sounder: Like Father Like Dog. (2005, March 29). Retrieved January 11, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Sounder-Like-Father-Like-Dog/24486

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 3/29/2005 11:47:49 AM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 993
Pages: 4

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