The Snob By Morley Callaghan

The reason that John ignores his father in this story is he thinks that Grace wouldn’t like him because, she only likes and appreciates the people in her “class”. When John first notices his father in the store “his coat was thrown open, two buttons on his shirt were undone, his grey hair was too long, and in his rather shabby clothes he looked very much like a working man, carpenter perhaps” made him resent his father more so than normal.

John and his mother told him over 100 times that when he was in public that he should be dressing in his nice clothes. He was worried that Grace is going to see him dressed like that and judge him and his family based on the appearance of his father. John wants to make a good impression on Grace and knows that if she was to meet his father in the state he was in the book store Grace would look at john a different way.

At the end of the story when john is taking his anger out on Grace because he is now regretting ignoring his father, Grace says “Who likes to spend very much time in a department store on a hot afternoon? I start to hate every person that bangs in to me, everyone near me. What does that make me? ” John says “That makes you snob”. John is accusing Grace of being a snob because of not wanting people to bump in to her. He doesn’t want to admit what he did he so he takes it out on her. I think that John is the actual snob in this story.

For making accusations about Grace not liking the way his father looks. Doing what he did to his father just to try and impress some girl was not right. By ignoring his father and pretending that he never saw him in the book store, just to avoid a potential awkward in counter with Grace seeing his dad like that makes John look like the snob. As well as Grace had no idea what was going on or why John was acting so angry at the end of the story. In the two stories “The Snob” and “Two fishermen” both of the men’s integrity is tested.

In Two Fishermen when the man was put in the position of having to stand up for a new friend he has made that is innocent or act like the crowd did and was against him for what he did he was unable to stand up to the crowd witch lead him to flee the area never to seen again so his identity wouldn’t be taken from him. This also goes for John in the story The Snob. He has to choose whether he will introduce Grace to his father dressed the way he was or not. In the end he doesn’t end up doing it and John’s father has to walk away feeling hurt due his sons way of going about dealing with a situation.