Hunting is often interpreted as the idealized projection of men’s desires to win. It is wildly accepted that a man who is good at hunting is of courage, confidence, sensitivity, perseverance and more. In its most general sense, men are supposed to jump up and down with huge excitement when they kill the fair game. However, it is not always the case. In Art Coelho’s story “My First Kill”, a twelve-year-old boy’s initial hunting experience is filled with constant self doubts and painful struggles against the social norms of the patriarchal society. Ironically, the first kill might be the last kill because of the huge price the narrator pays for his inevitable obedience and powerless rebellion.

Obviously, the teenage boy is tightly controlled by his father who sticks to the social “norms” of a pervasively patriarchal society, which marks one of the most important reasons why the narrator’s first kill might be the last kill. Greatly influenced by the family tradition, his father is deeply convinced that a boy should become a man of masculine traits and masculine personality. He also strongly believes that hunting is an effective way to mold a boy into a “qualified” man. In this sense, the disciplined father is very keen on making the boy a good shot because he believes hunting will equip the boy with the skills and personalities needed in a patriarchal society. He constantly provides hunting guidelines and set high goals for his son. For example, the father told the boy to “hit the mark” and warned him about shooting owls. He doesn’t want to see his son go against the social norms just like he doesn’t want to see plants grew in patches. Contrary to the attempt to create a confident, courageous, and independent man, the father’s tightly control and the son’s almost completely obedience lead to a craven teenage boy who fails to think for himself. The boy called his father “the boss” and always tries to “measure up to everything” to meet his father’s approval. The boy is so subordinated to his father that he never realizes he is automatically giving up the chance to be an independent person. No wonder when he unconsciously killed the younger cock, he was in fact sabotaging his access to self-independence and self-assertion.

I would not say the narrator never tries to follow his heart, but I would say he is too tightly controlled by his father, or the pervasively patriarchal “norms”, that he merely has access to cultivating his personal expression. Self doubt and concern haunted him throughout his first kill, but he never thought of why he constantly hesitated and how to overcome the anxiety. There was a spark of self-assertion when he witnessed the young pheasant’s death: he didn’t want to tell his dad that he killed the young pheasant. He finally identified with the young cock as a warrior who “fought so bravely against the stronger one” and he felt remorseful not giving the cock “a Chinaman’s chance”. Whereas, he still shoot the older pheasant, though extremely unwillingly, just because of the deeply rooted idea that “the last thing on this earth that I wanted to do was to make dad suspicious of my hunting ability”. When the narrator declared that “all the fun of the hunt had gone out of me”, it is not hard to make an inference of his ultimate lost interest in hunting. It is because the fact that he had to “fake the thrill of the hunt for dad” has made him deeply hurt inside.

The author does not point out the narrator’s first kill is exactly his last kill. However, based on the analysis made above, when the 12-year-old boy, who kept struggling on the border between the social pressure and his inner desire, finished his first kill, he had apparently given in to the social norms of the patriarchal society. No matter how hard he tried to rub out the blood stain on the stock, he could never erase the stain in his personal growth. What is more important, the painful surrender would manifest itself as an inevitable cause of the young boy’s last kill amid the first kill.