Things They Carried: In-Class Writing Wednesday, March 24

For this book, I want us to revisit one of the basic units of a good essay: a good paragraph. You will write two, well-crafted, thoughtful paragraphs developing one point each. You will have a topic sentence with some point of analysis or assertion about the text, and then use textual evidence from the book to support your assertion. Your analysis will be grounded in close reading. You two paragraphs do not have to relate or be on the exact same point if you don’t want. Remember: stay focused. These are not essays but body paragraphs developing and proving one main point each.

Requirements:

§ Topic sentences that are not just summary

§ Clipped quotes and phrases that help support the main idea of the paragraph

§ Correct cite and quotation format. I will mark down severely for this!!! This should be habit by now.

§ Well-integrated quotes

§ A concluding sentence

§ Ideally: no spelling or grammatical errors

Questions:

1) Return to the epigraph of the book. What is the “truth” O’Brien is trying to get at and how does he do this? Stick to a close reading of one passage or two. Examine O’Brien’s use of imagination and invention, and the difficulties posed by wartime conditions on truth-telling.

2) Throughout the stories, O’Brien juxtaposes images of great beauty with images of great horror, the scene of Curt Lemon’s death in "How to Tell A True War Story" being one notable example. Trace the use of such contrasting images across one of the stories. What do these contrasting images say about O’Brien’s experiences in Vietnam?

3) What is the role of women and girls in the book?  Examine the various female characters in the novel and explain what each may represent.

4) O’Brien claims all war stories are really about love. Using close reading of a passage or two, agree or disagree with this claim.

Sample Analysis Paragraphs:

from James McBride's The Color of Water

An important difference between James and his mother is their method of dealing with the pain they experience. While James turns inward, his mother Ruth turns outward, starting a new relationship, moving to a different place, keeping herself busy. Ruth herself describes that, even as a young girl, she had an urge to run, to feel the freedom and the movement of her legs pumping as fast as they can (42). As an adult, Ruth still feels the urge to run. Following her second husband's death, James points out that, "while she weebled and wobbled and leaned, she did not fall. She responded with speed and motion. She would not stop moving" (163). As she biked, walked, rode the bus all over the city, "she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did. She ran, as she had done most of her life, but this time she was running for her own sanity" (164). Ruth's motion is a pattern of responding to the tragedy in her life. As a girl, she did not sit and think about her abusive father and her trapped life in the Suffolk store. Instead she just left home, moved on, tried something different. She did not analyze the connections between pain and understanding, between action and response, even though she seems to understand them. As an adult, she continues this pattern, although her running is modified by her responsibilities to her children and home.

The image of running that McBride uses here and elsewhere supports his understanding of his mother as someone who does not stop and consider what is happening in her life yet is able to move ahead. Movement provides the solution, although a temporary one, and preserves her sanity. Discrete moments of action preserve her sense of her own strength and offer her new alternatives for the future. Even McBride's sentence structure in the paragraph about his mother's running supports the effectiveness of her spurts of action without reflection. Although varying in length, each of the last seven sentences of the paragraph begins with the subject "She" and an active verb such as "rode," "walked," "took," "grasp" and "ran." The section is choppy, repetitive and yet clear, as if to reinforce Ruth's unconscious insistence on movement as a means of coping with the difficulties of her life.

from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

#1 The negative effect the environment can have on the individual is shown in Morrison's comparison of marigolds in the ground to people in the environment. Early in the novel, Claudia and Frieda are concerned that the marigold seeds they planted that spring never sprouted. At the end of the novel, Claudia reflects on the connection to Pecola's failure:

I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, our land, our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. (206)

Morrison obviously views the environment as a powerful influence on the individual when she suggests that the earth itself is hostile to the growth of the marigold seeds. In a similar way, people cannot thrive in a hostile environment. Pecola Breedlove is a seed planted in the hostile environment, and, when she is not nurtured in any way, she cannot thrive.

#2 One effect of the belief that white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes are the most beautiful is evident in the characters who admire white film stars. Morrison shows an example of the destructive effect of this beauty standard on the character Pecola. When Pecola lives with Claudia and Frieda, the two sisters try to please their guest by giving her milk in a Shirley Temple mug. Claudia recalls, "She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple's face" (19). This picture of two young African-American girls admiring the beauty of a white American film star is impossible for Claudia to comprehend. Another character who admires white beauty is Maureen Peale. As Pecola and the girls walk past a movie theater on their way home with Maureen, Maureen asks if the others "just love" Betty Grable, who smiles from a movie poster. When she later tells the others she is cute and they are ugly, Maureen reveals her belief that she is superior because she looks more like a Betty Grable image than the blacker girls do. Pecola's and Maureen's fascination with popular images is preceded by Pauline's own belief in the possibility of movie images. She describes doing her hair like Jean Harlow's and eating candy at a movie. Rather than being transported into the romantic heaven of Hollywood, she loses a tooth and ends in despair. "Everything went then. Look like I just didn't care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly" (123). Admiring beauty in another is one thing; transferring a sense of self-hatred when a person doesn't measure is another. At that point, the power of white beauty standards becomes very destructive.

Literary Analysis Terms:

Group 1 – basic lit terms with familiar meanings and easy application 1. Alliteration 2. Allusion 3. Connotation 4. Denotation 5. Euphemism 6. Flashback 7. Hyperbole 8. Imagery 9. Irony 10. Metaphor 11. Motif 12. Onomatopoeia 13. Personification 14. Setting 15. Simile 16. Stanza 17. Style 18. Symbol 19. Theme 20. Tone

Group 2 – complex lit terms with deeper meanings and more challenging application 1. Anadiplosis 2. Anaphora 3. Anastrophe 4. Antithesis 5. Aphorism 6. Aporia 7. Assonance 8. Asyndeton 9. Cacophony 10. Caesura 11. Consonance 12. End-stopped 13. Enjambed 14. Euphony 15. Invective 16. Inversion 17. Oxymoron 18. Persona 19. Polysyndeton 20. Synaesthesia

Group 3 – poetic structure lit terms dealing with rhythm, rhyme, and stanza format 1. Anapest 2. Blank Verse 3. Dactyl 4. Dimeter 5. Feminine Rhyme 6. Foot 7. Free Verse 8. Heroic Couplet 9. Iamb 10. Internal Rhyme 11. Meter 12. Masculine Rhyme 13. Pentameter 14. Quatrain 15. Rhyme Scheme 16. Spondee 17. Tercet 18. Tetrameter 19. Trimeter 20. Trochee