Discipline by Donald Ray Pollock

In Discipline, by Donald Ray Pollock, there is a constant comparison between father and son.  Luther, the father, and Sammy seem to have a relationship that is not father and son.  In the story, Sammy only seems to be someone that Luther can live through vicariously.  Luther talks about his failure against Bobby Lowe’s father in several heavyweight competitions, and seems to be forcing the same rivalry between Bobby and Sammy.  He rarely even acknowledges Sammy as his son and does not seem to be happy with who Sammy is.  When Luther sees Bobby, he can only think of how much better Bobby is than Sammy, which causes him to push Sammy even harder than he was before.  He calls him his son at the beginning of the story, but it is merely to introduce Sammy as a character, instead of having the emotional connection between Luther and his son.  It seems that Luther only uses Sammy to accomplish what he could not do when he was Sammy’s age.  Sammy does not seem to be his own person, only a boy controlled by his father.  A reason that he does not say anything about this is because he is, in some way, receiving affection from his father, which is better than no affection at all.  Once Sammy dies, Luther finally has the realization of how much Sammy meant to him, not as someone to train, but as his son.  Luther refers to Sammy as “his boy” after Sammy dies, and then begins to push himself into training harder than he had trained when Sammy was alive.  This may be because he feels bad about being the cause of Sammy’s death, and feels that he needs to take responsibility for how much he pushed Sammy.  At the end of the story, Luther goes to train at the spot that Sammy died, which seems to show that he is finally accepting responsibility for his actions, which led to Sammy’s death.