Throughout the first chapter Asher is introduced to strong feelings and emotions at a very young age. He is already beginning to feel darkness, when he is in hi bed, and is trying to incorporate that feeling into his drawings. For a six year old, he has found a medium to express his feelings and perceptions. Once he states how the world is not prettty despite his mother and father's objections. Learning all of this at such a young age will cause his dreams to fade. At six, children have dreams of being ruich and famous, but since Asher already learned some of the realities to life he will know the likiness of not suceeding. Asher will also begin to mature at a much earlier age. In the next chapter he is starting off in school, and emotionally he is much more ahead of all of his classmates. Learning to deal with his sick mother abd narrow minded father he will have a different take on life. Sinve he already knows that the world is not pretty, he will be a lot more grounded towards what to expect from life.
The last page of the chapter leaved the three main characters off on very separate and new journies. The mood and attitude had changed inside the householf and Asher stopped drawing. Once Riveh, his mother, became emotionally ill Asher's drawings took a step onto a new level. Before Asher has drwan scenery and people, and for the most part he drewwhat he saw. Once the illness came he began to draw unknown objects and turned them into his deepest feelings. For example the Russian Jew, Asher had never seen one, but he wanted to portray one. He thought of the Russian to have immense pain and suffering, and in the end he had colored tje man in as if it were himself. At that young age, Asher was relating powerful emotions into his art. Now that everyonbe in his family has moved with their life, Asher does not have as strong feelings to portray in his drawings, and therefore stops. Also Asher related all of his darker works of art to the fantasy of a child.(pg 52) Asher deperately wanted to grow older and now that those feelings have subsided he can put the painting away to the back of his mind.
Throughout the first chapter it is assumed that the mother is the main cause of Asher's sudden darkness and cynism, but I feel that in part some of that goes to Asher's father. The father is very narrow minded in the way that he is fully committed to his religion, and anything outside if it is wrong. Whenever Asher would ask his father a deep question, it was never answered, but brushed off to the side. With his mother sick Asher needed more love and compassion from his father than he was recieving. His father did not enjoy the drawings Asher was creating nor did he understand the value they had on Asher. With the fathers blindness to his son's warning signs, Asher is presented with darkness and loniliness very earky in his lifetime. On the other side if the story, though, Aryeh was in the same pain too. He was away from the job he loved and his family was falling apart in front of his eyes. His only way of coping was through the Jewish religon. Asher picked up the importance of the religon to his father, but with his father gone for many trips, his influence will become less of an effect on Asher.