Most individuals may argue that a divorce may only effects the people getting a divorce, but in reality divorce effects everyone connected to the couple actually being divorced. In a divorce everyone is effected differently. In the victims the author Sharon olds shows a father daughter type relationship and how their relationship changed through childhood and adulthood. In the victims the speaker is a child that is now an adult reflecting and venting on her childhood and discussing her feelings towards her father. The speaker’s attitude toward her father is negative and hated in the first part of the poem but as the poem progress the speaker becomes almost regretful of how she treated her father and wondering who the real victim really is.…show more content… The speaker tells how the mother taught them how to hate their father, “she taught us to take it, to hate you and take it” (15). The quote makes it seem that the mother filled her kids head with all the negative attributes of their father and not the positive, make them resent him and hate him. In this part of the poem it is like the speaker is speaking more like an adult and is taking the blame off the father and not making him seem like the bad guy in the situation. The speaker compares her father to bums in the street. The bum’s serve as a metaphor that the father lost everything he worked for and loved, “Now I pass the bums in doorways, the white slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits, the stained flippers of their hands” (17-21). Like her father, bums have lost everything and are all alone with no support, “the speaker's adult perspective, asserted in the final lengthy sentence that begins with an overt marker of the temporal shift -" Now I / pass the bums in the doorways . . . "- expresses no empathy for the father …The lack of sympathy evident in these lines, the assumption that these "bums" earned their misery, is a rare example of Olds venting spleen but without offering any conflicting response to suggest tension in her feelings toward the father”( Dillon). The speaker uses a yet another metaphor when she says “ships gone down with the lanterns lit” (Olds 22-23). She uses ships sinking to compare her family. After everything the father did it brought the family down like a ship. The lanterns being lit on the ship means that there is still light, there are still some good things about the father and room for forgiveness. In the last few lines of the poem the speaker flips her perspective of her father and sees him as the victim, the one who lost everything, “and I wonder who took it and took it from them in silence until they had given it all away