9.The Key to My Father

This is an open blog forum for Coben's very short story "The Key to My Father". You decide what you would like to post. You may like to consider characterization/the descriptions of the father, genre/point of view, the symbol of the key, your response to the text and so on.

7. Family ties

The three texts we read on the gay marriage debate force us to look more closely at marriage as an institution and what it means to society. Maggie Gallagher's insistence on marriage for procreation and the protection of children raises some interesting and debatable questions about what exactly constitutes a 'family'. This brings us neatly to our second course theme, FAMILY TIES. From now until the end of the semester, we will be exploring this concept through our readings, films and oral presentations.

So, in order to set the theme, please explore the following questions:

What exactly is a family? Is it a group of people bound together by love? By marriage? By blood? By history? By shared memories? By economic dependency? By habit? What unites family members and what divides them? Does family denote only a traditional nuclear family or also a family broken by divorce and blended by remarriage? (all questions taken from The Blair Reader, p.78).

In answering these questions, consider your observations of Turkish society as well as your own personal experiences.