English notes
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[edit] Quiet American, Graham Greene
Synopsis: Young American Pyle goes to Vietnam, with the intent of solving the problems by introducing (supporting) a “Third Force.” Ends up getting caught in a love triangle between Fowler and Phuong.
Point of view: First person, from Fowler’s point of view.
Chronology: Cyclical. Begins close to end, when Fowler is ‘learning’ about Pyle’s death, then moves back in time to describe how he originally met Pyle.
Key characters: Fowler, Pyle, Phuong (important character, but is flat; underdeveloped, described more as an object).
Style of writing: Cynical voice.
Themes: Betrayal, New vs. old, America vs. England, the gift of death, idealism.
Key points to consider:
Begins with subtle descriptions of setting, thus hinting at the fact that they are in Vietnam.
Speaks a lot about death; how death is a gift. Irony present when Fowler (F) says “One is not jealous of the dead.”
“With death, there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying.”
Pyle (P) does not smoke; Vietnamese superstition that lover who smokes always returns: foreshadowing.
P has idealistic views from his reading of York Harding; wants to create Third Force in Vietnam.
P described as quiet American, as “precisely as ‘a blue lizard’ or ‘a white elephant.’” Phuong (Ph) is first to use this description of him; others follow suit.
F keeps trying to convince himself that “noone but P was responsible for his death.”; also later says about York Harding: “he killed P – at a long range.”
F arranged for P’s death because of his love for Ph, but tries to convince himself he did it because of the danger of P’s idealism. Gets aggravated when Vigot asks him if he knows why P was killed.
F describes himself as reporter, not correspondent. “I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.”
P does not see problems at face value, but rather aims to fit what he sees to his/York’s theories: “When he saw a dead body, he couldn’t even see the wounds.”
F claims he has “never believed in permanence”, but appears to yearn for it.
P falls in love with Ph, and goes out to F to tell him, taking great risk to himself.
F gets angered when P says that they both have “her interests at heart.”
Description of P: “as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others.”
F says that he has experience to match P’s virginity, age to match his youth.
P offers Ph “security and respect”, but does not expect her to love him yet.
While P argues that the Vietnamese “don’t want Communism”, F retorts that they “want enough rice,” indicating the contrast between reality and Pyle/York’s theory. F: “Isms and ocracies. Give me the facts.”
F tells of one childish aspect of girls in Vietnam: “they love you in return for kindness, security, the presents you give them – they hate you for a blow or an injustice”; “love is a Western word…to cover up an obsession with one woman.”
“To be in love…is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself.”
In wife’s letter, she guesses accurately that F is “getting old” and doesn’t “like living alone.”
F lies about content of wife’s letter to Ph. This causes her to leave him.
F says, “It was as if I had been betrayed, but one is not betrayed by an enemy,”; in essence talking about his own betrayal of P – a friend.
Ph to F is little more than a security for himself; a thought for a bored mind: “thought of Ph because of her complete absence…when you escape to a desert the silence shouts.”
F says about P: “…was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.”
F: “There’s no such thing as gratitude in politics.”
“They were only war casualties,” says P.
F envies French soldier sitting with hand in girl’s lap.
Near the end, F asks, “Are you happy?” to Ph, and gets a careless response of “of course.”
[edit] Lady With the Toy Dog, Anton Chekov
Synopsis: Gomov, a married man, was used to cheating on his wife with many women. Meets Anna one day, who is also bored with her marriage, like himself. They decide never to meet again, but Gomov later realizes that he has to see her again. She tells him she will come to Moscow instead, and they end up together again.
Point of view: Third person, focus on Gomov.
Chronology: Linear.
Key characters: Anna Sergueyevna, Gomov
Style of writing: Much character delineation comes from inner thought.
Themes: Forbidden love, women as sex objects, true love vs. physical love,
Key points to consider:
Begins as a reporting: “It was reported that a new face had been seen…”
‘Toy Dog’ often translated as ‘Little Dog’ in other forms of the translated book.
Toy Dog has a symbolic meaning with respect to the way Anna is treated by Gomov to begin with.
Little Dog only appears as a pet, with no further significance.
Gomov (G) considered females to be inferior to men.
G is attractive in appearance and even in nature.
G thinks about Anna (A): “If she is here without a husband or friend…make her acquaintance,” as though this is a decisive condition. It becomes evident later that it is not.
When A says that G is the first to lose respect for her, half an hour passes in silence before he retorts that he has no reason to cease to respect her.
A month after their parting, G is expecting A’s memory to be lost in the “mists of memory…just as other women had done,” but something is different about her.
He eventually goes to S. to find her. She is shocked by this, and tells him that he has to leave, but that she will come to Moscow.
She tells her husband that she is going to consult a specialist in women’s diseases. G in this sense can in fact be interpreted as the expert in infidelity; considerable as a disease.
G realizes that he has never loved anyone before A: “And now at last when his hair was grey he had fallen in love – real love – for the first time in his life.”
Ends with a foreboding of the difficulties of the future.
[edit] Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff, Alice Walker
Synopsis: Hannah Kemhuff goes to rootworkers to get revenge on Miss Sadler, a white woman who she feels was the reason for her terrible state. During the Depression, Miss Sadler was in charge of handing out the food rations, and refused to give her food. Gets rootworkers to cast a curse on Hannah, ‘ensuring’ that Miss Sadler will die a horrible death shortly after her own.
Point of view: First person, unnamed narrator speaking.
Chronology: Linear.
Key characters: Narrator, Tante Rosie, Hannah Kemhuff, Miss Sadler/Mrs. Holley, Caroline
Style of writing: Plain narrative. Flashback in the form of dialogue in beginning.
Themes: Power of suggestion, racism, vengeance.
Key points to consider:
Begins in media res, without much introduction. Even first paragraph describes a remembering to the time when an ‘old woman’ came to them while she was an apprentice with Tante Rosie.
Tante Rosie’s rootworking is a hoax.
Miss Sadler refused to give food to Hannah and fam. because they were dressed in nice clothes that they had received from her sister Carrie Mae.
Selfish traits of Hannah are clear from her dismissive way of describing her sister’s murder, as a passing comment.
Mrs. Holley clearly has racial prejudices (“…this nigger magic!”), but ironically has a black friend. Relationship is slightly patronizing, however (“ ‘She is my…ah…friend.’”)
Narrator visits Mrs. Holley, and tells her how she needs to get a sample of her hair, feces, etc. for their curse.
After death of Mrs. Holley, she is described as a person who has great concern for those less fortunate than herself.
Further irony of the story is that the curse only worked because Mrs. Holley becomes paranoid and becomes painstaking in her effort to prevent any of the necessary ‘ingredients’ from coming to the wrong hands.
[edit] Roselily, Alice Walker
Synopsis: Wedding of a Mississippi-based African American woman with a Muslim man.
Point of view: Third person, focus always on thoughts of Roselily.
Chronology: Linear. Passage of time slowed.
Key characters: Roselily, fiancée.
Style of writing: Dual tone of voice; ranting tone. Entire text is a description of her immediate thoughts when she hears words from the wedding ceremony.
Themes: Change, culture clash, duties of a woman, religion.
Key points to consider:
Begins with well-known lines from wedding ceremony.
Repetitive use of words like she wonders, she thinks, she believes.
Slowing effect of time created by elongated thought process between lines from wedding ceremony.
Thinking ahead to a better life: “But in Chicago. Respect, a chance to build.’
Her fiancée has promised her “rest she had prayed for.” However, she is not certain how grateful she should be of this ‘kind’ gesture: “Her hands will be full. Full of what? Babies. She is not comforted.”
“She does not even know if she loves him. She loves his sobriety….his pride.” This is not a marriage out of love, but rather out of impatience. “Impatient to be done with sewing.”
He has a different religion; she understands that this means that he will never be accepted.
Religion has always been an obstacle for her, not just now. “It seems to her he [the preacher] has alwaysbeen standing in front of her, barring her way.”
[edit] How Did I Get Away With Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy, Alice Walker
Synopsis: Girl is raped at age 12, and again at later ages. Mother protests when she discovers that she is seeing a white man. Girl gets her committed at mental asylum, with help of the man, who is a lawyer. Eventually kills lawyer with his own gun. Murder described by newspapers as done by burglars.
Point of view: First person, unnamed narrator speaking.
Chronology: Flashbacks in linear form.
Key characters: Narrator, Mama, Bubba (lawyer).
Style of writing: Written as a single continuous dialogue. Strong ranting tone; e.g. starts talking about why her home street Poultry Street was called exactly that.
Themes:
Key points to consider:
Begins with somewhat unrelated details of a setting that has little relevance in the text.
Less important male figures in story are described as pathetic characters: “…my own father had children somewhere of [his] own that [he’d] left.”
The fact that she herself had been raped follows a description of how her neighborhood was smelly and noisy and “women were always yelling about something.”
Rape is described in a very downplayed manner. “It was nothing for a girl…to be raped.”
Strongly blasé about her own rape incident. Speaks of it as more of a milestone in her life rather than a traumatic event: “I was raped myself, when I was twelve.”
Describes herself as being politically and socially unaware. Great emphasis on her young age. This is reflected in the manner in which she narrates. For example, her naïvety is shown by her belief in his declaration of loving her: “I thought he loved me. That meant something to me.”
Rape at age 12 was not a single incident. Happens several times; she is eventually convinced that the man does it because he loves her.
While being originally reluctant to sleep with Bubba, the act becomes more natural and willing as the ‘rapes’ continue.
Bubba also begins to pay her: “my body did what it was paid to do.”
At age 17, she gets her mother committed to a mental asylum.
After a while in the mental asylum, mother is somehow able to get a lawyer to defend her case, but by that time, the shock treatments have left her an empty shell.
Does not appear to have killed Bubba out of a need for vengeance, but rather because she becomes sick of him: “…to tell the truth, I couldn’t stand it another minute in that place.”
Title of text is misleading. How ‘easy’ it was to kill the lawyer is a very minor detail.
[edit] The Flowers, Alice Walker
Synopsis: Myop accidentally steps on the head of a dead man while exploring the woods behind her house.
Point of view: Third person, focus on Myop.
Chronology: Linear.
Key characters: Myop, dead man.
Style of writing: Written in italics. Clear change in tone of narration from colorful and jovial to deathly and rotted.
Themes: Life and death.
Key points to consider:
Begins with ten-year-old Myop skipping around her family’s farm.
Summer scene represents life. Vivid descriptions of colorful nature. Time of harvesting. Her own movements are described as jovial; skipping around, “bouncing this way and that.” Myop picks flowers.
The stepping incident occurs when Myop decides to turn back to the house, to the “peacefulness of the morning.”
Clear separation between jovial nature and morbid horror, with the onomatopoeic word smack, as it appears in the sentence “it was then she stepped smack into his eyes.”
Rotted clothes gives impression that body has been there for a while. Previously, no indication is given of man being dead from before; stepping incident merely described as “stepped into his eyes,” thus creating an added sense of vulgarity.
End of summer represents death. Tone changes to focus on rotted clothes, rotted noose. Use of negative descriptive words: “frayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled.” Notice repeated use of word “rotted.” Myop puts down flowers as story closes.
Presence of noose implies lynching; creates images of dead body being left out to rot after a hanging in reader’s mind, despite lack of direct description of any of this in text.
References to man being dead are relatively ambiguous: descriptions in past tense (“He had been a tall man”), unnatural descriptions: “His head lay beside him.”
Myop reacts very unaffectedly, as she goes to pick a wild pink rose immediately after seeing the body, and adds it to her bundle.
Powerful closing: “And the summer was over.”
[edit] English Paper 2 criteria
[edit] A: Knowledge and understanding of works
Know the works studied- perceptive understanding, subtleties of their meaning
Knowledge in relation to the question
Detailed and appreciated references to work studied- detailed and persuasive references
[edit] B: Response to the question
Understand specific demands of question.
Response to these demands
How well have you illustrated claims
Relevant personal response
Ideas should be convincing and show independence of thought, when appropriate
analysis of ideas is consistently detailed, persuasively illustrated by carefully chosen examples
Don’t forget the subtleties of the question, as well as the main implications
[edit] C: Appreciation of literary features
Awareness of literary features;
1.diction
2.imagery
3.tone
4.structure
5.style
6.technique
Appreciate the effects of literary features in relation to the question
support claims of effects of literary features; always give persuasive examples critical analysis
[edit] D: Presentation
Organization of essay- purposeful and effective
supporting examples to be well integrated into essay
Effective presentation of ideas
