HMWK: Read "Sweetheart Of the Song Tra Bong" for discussion tomorrow and the shorter "Enemies" and Dentist"
1. "Love," "Spin" "On the Rainy River"
Some Issues for this reading selection –
1. Short interlude pieces – what are they for? Examine titles
2. "Keep Your Eye On…" (characters Bowker, Azar) What do we learn about them?
3. "Spin" – moments of quiet; if this were music it would be meditative in tone.
"That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." (O'Brien 40)
4. "On the Rainy River" – let go of clichés of soldiers – what’s the "right thing to do" for Tim? Kill/die because he was embarrassed not to --
5. Introduction of fictional aspect of novel – "hallucinations" at the river.
Metafiction:
Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a fictional work.
Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as the 9th-century One Thousand and One Nights and Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales. Cervantes' Don Quixote is a metafictional novel, as is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In the 1950s several French novelists published works whose styles were collectively dubbed "nouveau roman". These "new novels" were characterized by their bending of genre and style and often included elements of metafiction. It became prominent in the 1960s, with authors and works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover's The Babysitter and The Magic Poker, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and William H. Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife. William H. Gass coined the term “metafiction” in a 1970 essay entitled “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”. Unlike the antinovel, or anti-fiction, metafiction is specifically fiction about fiction, i.e. fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself.
Questions for discussion:
Why is the first story told in the third person? What effect does it have on you as a reader to then switch to the first person in “Love”? O’Brien also uses the second person in this collection. For example, in “On the Rainy River,” the narrator, trying to decide whether to accept the draft or become a draft dodger, asks: “What would you do?” (page 56). Why does the author use these different perspectives?
Who is Elroy Bendahl, and why is he “the hero of [the narrator’s] life” (page 48)?
At the end of "On the Rainy River," the narrator makes a kind of confession: "The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war" (61). What does this mean?
Literary Terms for Friday Quiz
Here are the new words for Friday's quiz:
Know logos, pathos, ethos
Click the words for examples of these AP terms. For a definition, see your AP packet.
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