Week 6

Library at Ancient Ephesus 

Good afternoon, students.  Hope you are feeling loved this Valentine's Day in whatever way life affords!

   The quiz question last dealt with how we identify or define the central character, the protagonist, that is.  Usually, the sheer attention given to one character over all others makes the matter simple. Still, it helps to apply certain tests.  What is the central conflict of the story?  and who faces it most directly? that is, for whom is there more at stake in the issue?  We meet in "The Found Boat"  a group of two girls and three boys, all in the "flood" of changes that come with adolescence and the sexual awakenings of puberty.  Of the five, only Eva's consciousness is directly open to us by means of a third-person narrator that reveals what she is thinking and imagining.  She has an adventurous, bold mind and spirit, in keeping with her name, which recalls the first woman in biblical myth.  We learn of her attraction to Clayton, whose storied name recalls that of Adam, first man, formed of clay by God.  Clayton is a leader among the boys, rather silently so, and the man of his home (his father dead), and Eva likes him.  The group's journey out of town in the boat on the flooded Wawanash sets the stage for the climactic encounter in which Eva reveals her naked self to Clayton. It is modern version of an ancient encounter that each of us enacts if we seek intimacy of the kind involving sex. Which is where life begins, we need not be reminded, and a holy place, therefore. Every society will "interpret" the archetypal scene in its fashion, but in the end, seems to me, there is the natural fact, of human desire.

  On to "Breakfast," by John Steinbeck, and "The Portable Phonograph," by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, two stories featuring solitaries and vast landscapes opening onto the mysteries of our nature and relationship to each other.

Atom Bomb

Homework Readings and Writing:  Read "The Bitch," by Colette,  "Three Shots," by Ernest Hemingway, and "Through the Tunnel," by Doris Lessing.

In an essay of 400-450 words describe how the element of setting literally and symbolically conveys a story's themes.  Choose a story read in class over the past several weeks.