Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Professor Johnston
Assignment 1
11 September 2010
At just about the hour when my father died, soon after dawn one February morning, when ice
coated the windows like cataracts, I banged my thumb with a hammer. Naturally, I swore at
the hammer, the reckless thing, and in the moment of swearing I thought of what my father
would say: “If you’d try hitting the nail it would go in a whole lot faster. Don’t you know
Scott Russell Sanders, author of the non-fiction essay “The Inheritance of Tools”, was born in
Memphis, Tennessee on October 26th, 1945. He spent his early childhood in Tennessee and his school
years in Ohio. After graduating from high school, Sanders pursued his undergraduate degree in English
and physics at Brown University and then continued school at Cambridge University with the aid of a
Marshall Scholarship, where he graduated in 1971 with a doctoral degree in English (Ashland 1).
“The Inheritance of Tools” is a story of life, love and loss that takes the reader on a journey of
Sanders’ memories that he has of his father and grandfather growing up. Throughout the essay, Sanders
uses carpentry to represent an unspoken love that has been passed on to each generation of men in his
family. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze the author’s use of figurative language, structural
organization and imagery throughout the essay and how each was used to develop and tie together the
was actually in the first sentence of the essay: “...one February morning when ice coated the windows
like cataracts...”(Tools 1). The use of this simile tells the author’s audience that the story is taking place
during the dead of winter. The second example of a simile can be found in the second paragraph of the
essay: “...scratched and pockmarked, like an old plow-share that has been working rocky fields (Tools
1)”. Through this description, the author allows the audience to form an image of the central theme, the
inherited tools, in their mind’s eye. The use of figurative language throughout allows the essay to
Secondly, the author’s use of framing in his organizational structure also gives the essay great
literary merit. He begins the essay with the story of the day that he found out his father had died. After
injuring his thumb working on a wall for his daughter’s bedroom, the author’s wife calls to him and
informs him of the bad news. The knowledge of his death pushes the pain from the author’s sore thumb
to the back of his mind and seems to spark all of the memories he had growing up, learning carpentry
from his father, who had learned it all from the author’s grandfather.
The author then takes his audience on a journey of love, life and lessons learned, and ties it all
together by once again mentioning the soreness of the injury he’d gotten earlier. Anger rises up inside
him, not only because of this new injury, but also because of the death of his father, but after a few
moments, the author calms himself and goes back to his work, keeping the memory of his father and
grandfather alive through the use of the lessons he learned from them.
And finally, throughout the entire essay, the author also uses the image of the inherited tools to
show the bond that the author had with his father, as well as the bond that he and his father had with the
author’s grandfather. Through carpentry, which entailed hard work and dedication, three generations
shared many experiences that brought them closer together, their love for each other often not verbally
spoken, but instead shown through lessons that each man learned from their predecessor. Each
generation taught their muse hard-work, dedication and precision as they learned to master the art of
carpentry together.
In my opinion, “The Inheritance of Tools” had the most literary merit out of the four non-fiction
essays. The essay was beautifully written, not only stylistically, but organizationally as well. The essay
was very relatable as well, seeing as everyone must deal with the loss of a loved one at some point in
their lives. The three main things that gave the essay literary merit, however, were the author’s use