When art gets this relationship right, we don't just see characters. We see our own umbilical cords, cut or still hanging, bleeding ink and light onto the page.

Here, the son views the mother as a fortress. She is the repository of unconditional love. In The Pursuit of Happyness , the mother is the catalyst for the father’s heroism; her absence (or departure) forces the son into a survival pact with the father. In these stories, the son’s ultimate virtue is gratitude . He must succeed to validate her sacrifice. The tragedy of this archetype is that the son often succeeds for her, but rarely with her. Then came Freud, Tennessee Williams, and the auteurs of the 20th century who decided to take a scalpel to the apron strings. The "devouring mother" trope is the shadow side of the sacred bond. She loves her son so completely that she prevents him from becoming a man.

. Amir’s mother died giving birth to him. This "original sin" haunts his relationship with his father, Baba. Because Amir killed the mother, he feels he can never earn the father’s love. The entire plot—the betrayal of Hassan, the journey to save Sohrab—is a desperate attempt to atone for the crime of having been born, to fill the maternal silence with heroic noise. The Son as Caretaker (The Role Reversal) As our population ages, modern art is finally looking at the moment the son becomes the father to the man.