Character analysis
The Grandfather
in Kamikaze by Beatrice Garland
The Grandfather is a minor yet thematically significant character in Kamikaze, mainly appearing through the memories and reflections of others rather than through direct action. He symbolizes the burden of cultural tradition, family obligations, and the social codes of honor that influenced the Kamikaze Pilot's upbringing. Although he doesn’t take up much space in the narrative, his presence hangs over the story as a representation of the values — loyalty, sacrifice, and obedience to a higher cause — that drove his son or son-in-law to undertake a suicide mission.
His character is mostly revealed through hindsight: seen in memories that highlight the strict moral framework he instilled in the family. He is depicted as a man of few words but great authority, whose approval or disapproval held significant weight. His silence regarding the Pilot's fate conveys a lot — whether interpreted as stoic acceptance, quiet sorrow, or complicity in the ideology that insisted on such sacrifice.
He exhibits traits like patriarchal sternness, strong nationalism, and an emotional reserve that can seem cold. However, subtle elements — a remembered gesture, a shared meal, a moment of silent tenderness — imply a more intricate inner life behind his stern facade. He serves as a lens through which the poem or text examines how inherited values can both unite a family and lead to its undoing, making him crucial for understanding the Pilot's tragic choice and the family's ensuing shame and silence.
Who is The Grandfather?
In Beatrice Garland's Kamikaze, the grandfather occupies a position of almost entirely off-stage authority. He never speaks directly in the poem, and no single line is attributed to him alone, yet his presence is woven into the fabric of the text through the daughter's retrospective voice. He is the patriarchal elder of the family, a man whose identity is inseparable from the cultural codes of imperial Japan — honour, sacrifice, collective loyalty over individual survival. He belongs to the generation that built and maintained the ideology the kamikaze programme depended upon, and the poem situates him as its quiet embodiment rather than its critic. His significance is architectural: he is the foundation on which the moral world of the poem rests, even as that world is shown to be devastating in its human cost.
What is The Grandfather's arc and motivation?
Because the grandfather appears only in memory and inference, he has no arc in the conventional narrative sense. Instead, the poem traces the legacy of his values rather than his personal journey. His motivation, as reconstructed through the daughter's recollections, is the preservation of a strict honour code — one in which death in service of the emperor is the highest expression of loyalty, and survival achieved by turning back is an unforgivable rupture of duty. He does not need to actively punish the returning pilot; the social silence that greets the pilot on his return is itself the punishment the grandfather's world-view demands. His arc is the arc of an ideology made flesh: rigid in its early authority, and quietly devastating in its long-term consequences for those who live on after it.
What are The Grandfather's key moments?
The grandfather's most powerful moment is, paradoxically, his absence from the poem's present tense. The daughter recalls the family's collective silence after the pilot's return, and it is within that silence that the grandfather's influence is most keenly felt — he does not need to speak because the code he represents speaks for him. The daughter's memory of her father recounting what he saw on the water — the fat-bellied fish, the cloud-marked ocean — is framed within a childhood now irretrievably lost. The grandfather shadows that lost childhood as the source of the value system that made the pilot's return a matter of shame rather than relief. The meal at which the family refuses to acknowledge the pilot exists as another key scene: the grandfather, as the household's patriarchal conscience, is the invisible legislator of that refusal.
What are The Grandfather's most important relationships?
With the pilot: The grandfather is, in the poem's logic, the silent architect of the pilot's original obedience. The pilot internalised his elder's world-view completely enough to climb into a loaded aircraft and fly toward death. The tragedy deepens because it is the same value system — a love of the natural world instilled perhaps in fishing trips or shared observation of the sea — that causes the pilot to turn back. The grandfather gave the pilot both the compulsion to die and, indirectly, the sensory education that made him choose life.
With the daughter: The daughter is the poem's primary narrator, and her relationship with the grandfather is one of inherited ambivalence. She absorbed his values sufficiently to participate in the family's silencing of her father, as she confesses in the poem's devastating closing lines — "even I, his daughter". The grandfather's legacy lives most painfully in her: she enacted the shame culture he represented against the parent she also loved.
With the wife and children: The grandfather's patriarchal authority sets the template that the wife follows in turning away from the returned pilot. The children, too far downstream to question the source, simply receive a silence they cannot interpret. The grandfather's ideology, by the poem's end, has erased the pilot from his own family's living history.
How is The Grandfather connected to the other characters?
- The Kamikaze Pilot
The Grandfather is the patriarchal elder whose values of honour, duty, and self-sacrifice directly shaped the Pilot's worldview. His cultural and moral authority is a formative force behind the Pilot's willingness — or compulsion — to undertake a suicide mission, making him a silent architect of the tragedy.
- The Daughter
The Daughter mediates the reader's understanding of the Grandfather, filtering his memory and legacy through her own conflicted perspective. Her recollections of him help establish the family's value system and contextualise the shame and silence that follow the Pilot's return or death.
- The Wife
The Grandfather's relationship with the Wife is defined by generational and patriarchal hierarchy. His expectations of loyalty and conformity to social codes bear heavily on how the Wife responds to the Pilot's fate, as she must navigate both her own grief and the honour codes the Grandfather represents.
- The Children
As a grandparental figure, the Grandfather represents the oldest layer of inherited ideology that filters down to the Children. The values he instilled — and the silence surrounding the Pilot's story — shape what the Children understand, or are denied understanding, about their family's history.
Questions readers ask about The Grandfather
Who is the Grandfather in Kamikaze by Beatrice Garland?
The Grandfather is a minor yet thematically crucial off-stage figure in Kamikaze, never speaking directly but influencing every major event through the values he embodied. He serves as the family's patriarchal elder, connected to the cultural codes of imperial Japan — honor, collective loyalty, and the expectation of self-sacrifice. His authority is felt through the silence and shame that govern the family after the Pilot's return.
How does the Grandfather relate to the Kamikaze Pilot?
The Grandfather silently shapes the Pilot's original obedience, instilling the honor code that led him to board a loaded aircraft and fly toward death. Importantly, he also imparted a sensory education — an appreciation for the natural world — that ultimately prompted the Pilot to turn back. Thus, the Grandfather represents both the force that drove the Pilot toward sacrifice and the indirect source of the impulse that spared his life.
How does the Grandfather's relationship with the Daughter shape the poem?
The Daughter serves as the poem's primary narrator, and her conflicted memory of the Grandfather's values provides the lens through which the reader perceives the family's shame and silence. She internalized his honor code sufficiently to facilitate her own father's social erasure — a guilt she confesses in the poem's poignant closing lines. The Grandfather's legacy resides most painfully in her; she enacts the shame culture he represented against the parent she loved.
Why does the Grandfather never speak directly in the poem?
The Grandfather's silence highlights a critical theme: Garland uses his wordlessness to imply that deep cultural codes of honor are self-policing and can inflict harm without explicit command. His authority is architectural — the foundation of the family's moral framework. The social silence surrounding the returning Pilot serves as the punishment dictated by his worldview, enforcing itself without the need for spoken words.
What role does the Grandfather play in the family's silencing of the Pilot after his return?
The Grandfather acts as the invisible legislator behind the family's refusal to acknowledge the returned Pilot. As the household's patriarchal conscience, his presence is unnecessary at the meal where the family behaves as if the Pilot does not exist — the honor code he represented communicates for him. By the poem's conclusion, his ideology effectively erases the Pilot from his own family's living history.
Are there any direct quotes attributed to the Grandfather in Kamikaze?
No direct quotes are attributed to the Grandfather in the poem. His presence is conveyed entirely through the daughter's retrospective voice, remembered gestures, inherited silences, and the weight of cultural expectation rather than through spoken words. This intentional absence of quotation functions as a narrative device Garland employs to illustrate how patriarchal authority and cultural conditioning can operate without being explicitly stated.
Is the Grandfather a villain in Kamikaze?
The Grandfather is not presented as a straightforward villain; rather, he is depicted as a man whose strict nationalism and patriarchal demeanor contribute to the family's tragedy. Garland suggests a more complex inner life — moments of shared tenderness or quiet sorrow beneath his stern exterior — indicating he is less a willful agent of harm than a human embodiment of a damaging ideology. He is responsible not out of malice but due to unquestioning loyalty to an honor system that undermines those closest to him.
How does the Grandfather's influence affect the Wife and the Children in Kamikaze?
The Grandfather's patriarchal authority shapes the Wife's reaction to the returned Pilot, as she must navigate her grief within the honor codes he upholds. The Children, too distant to question the origin of the ideology, simply inherit a silence they struggle to understand. The Grandfather's values thus permeate every generation in the poem, ensuring that the Pilot is erased not only from society but also from his own family's comprehension of their history.
Use this in your essay
Silence as patriarchal enforcement: How does Garland use the grandfather's wordlessness to suggest that cultural codes of honour are self-policing, requiring no explicit command to cause harm?
The paradox of transmission: The grandfather instilled in the pilot both the duty to die *and* the love of the natural world that saved him
explore how Garland frames inherited values as internally contradictory.
Guilt and complicity: Using the daughter's confession that she too participated in her father's social death, argue that the grandfather's ideology implicates all family members in the poem's central injustice.
Absence as presence: Analyse how Garland constructs authority and moral weight through a character who is never directly quoted or described, examining what this technique implies about the nature of cultural conditioning.
Gender and hierarchy: Consider how the grandfather's patriarchal role differs from the wife's and daughter's in the enforcement of shame
does Garland suggest that women are more trapped by, or more complicit in, the honour system he represents?