"Shooting Dad" Dialogue

What is the significance of the title?

I think the significance of the title is made very clearly at the end of this dialogue. " I will go to the mountains with my mother, sister and the cannon. I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so that he doesn't take anyone with him. I will light the fuse. But I will not cover my ears. Because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt." (pg. 440)

When reading this dialogue, I noticed that the girl and her father were total opposites, they did not really agree on anything, she thought of him as an indifferent gunsmith and crazy republican, where as she thought of herself as a passionate music lover and democrat. Throughout her younger years she was always bothered by her fathers devotion to his gun collection and his obsession to make ammo, where as her twin sister found it fascinating. If anyone was an outcast in the family I would have to say that I think it was the narrator. She never really understood why her father was so passionate about his guns, but she thought one day that if she was ever going to try and understand him and his hobby that this was her chance, since she hated everything about guns, she found out that her father had been working on a project for a couple of years, he was making a cannon, she thought that if she was ever going to understand her fathers love for what he does that this was her time, she thought that this was a great opportunity because it was not a gun, and as she says in the writing it was "... a completely ceremonial object. Unwieldy and impractical. " (pg. 439) When she first called him and told him that she wanted to watch him shoot off the cannon, he was shocked, this is because she was never interested in any of his work before. They went up to the mountains in Montana and light off the small cannon. The narrator was intrigued, in a way that she never really thought of before. She thought that it was really neat and her father thought so too.

When the two hikers come about and see how the cannon is used, they noticed that she has a tape recorder and a microphone, which is called a shotgun mike. This is when she realizes that her and her father are the now the same person, just in different ways. She states "We're both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was no longer at his adversary" (pg. 439) This is when she realizes that her and her father both carry a passion and just because they are different projects that they care about does not mean that they cannot be close and not carry a relationship. At this point I think that all of the dislike that she had for her father growing up as a child began to vanish and she begin to appreciate her father for who he was, and not judge him on the acts of his projects.

With the last paragraph in the dialogue it captivates the the meaning of the writing. I believe that she is stating that she is "shooting dad" for who he was in her younger years, and will put his remains in a cannon as a new found bond that they established together. She is saying that will respect his love for is  projects and also not be covering her ears when the sounds goes off because she wants it to hurt, meaning the pain that she felt as a child when she was in her "hole", when her and her father had no communication. This would be her would be her closure.