Due today: John Steinbeck's short story
Flight.
In class: Everyone is assigned a short written response, which we'll use today to review the story. This is a for a homework grade.
For Tuesday, April 23....Please have read Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country. This was handed out last Friday. Copy below.
John Steinbeck 1902-1968
Reflecting the influence of the
Naturalists, John Steinbeck generally portrayed working-class characters who
were manipulated by forces beyond their understanding or control. Yet although many of his characters suffered
tragic fates, they almost always managed to retain a sense of dignity
throughout their struggles.
Steinbeck
was born in Salinas, California, the son of a county official and
a schoolteacher. The people and
landscape of the area in northern California
where he grew up eventually inspired many of the characters and setting of his
literary works. After graduating from
high school, he enrolled at Stanford
University. He left before graduating, however, and spent
the next five years drifting across the country, reading, writing and working
at odd jobs.
Steinbeck
had little success as a writer until 1935 when he published Tortilla Flat, his third novel. Two years later he earned widespread
recognition and critical acclaim with the publication of Of Mice and Men. This novel,
which portrays two drifters whose dream of owing their own farm ends in
tragedy, became a best-seller and was made into a Broadway play and a motion
picture. Steinbeck then went on to write
what is generally regarded as his finest novel, The grapes of Wrath (1939), the
accurate and emotional story of the “Oakies,” Oklahoma farmers dispossessed of
their land and forced to become migrant farmers in California. The novel won the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize and established Steinbeck as one of the most highly regarded
writers of his day.
Steinbeck produced several more
successful works during his later years, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl
(1947), East of Eden (1951) and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). In
1963 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In nearly
all of his works, including Flight,
Steinbeck creates vivid portraits of the landscape and demonstrates how people
are shaped and manipulated by their environments. At the same time, his works reflect his
belief in the need for social justice and his hope that people can learn from
the suffering of others.
Flight by John
Steinbeck
As you know, the setting is the
time and place in which the events in a work of literature occur.
Although it is not usually the most important
element in a literary work, the setting can often shape and motivate the
characters.
In real life viewed as being,
to some extent, products of their environments.
Similarly, characters in many literary works may be views as products of
the setting.
While a character’s
attitudes, values and behavior may be shaped by the long-term effect of the
setting, the setting may also have a more immediate impact on a character’s
actions.
For example, in Jack London’s
story
To Build a Fire, most of the
character’s actions result directly from his efforts to cope with the extreme
cold of the Arctic wilderness.
John
Steinbeck believed that people are often manipulated by the forces of society
and nature beyond their understanding or control. As a result, the setting
usually plays an important role in his works, often having an immediate and
long-term effect on the characters. In
most of his stories and novels, he describes the setting in exact detail and
clearly conveys how it shapes and motivates the characters.
Note: two other
works where setting influences the character’s actions- William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Written responses: see class list for the one you are assigned.
John Steinbeck’s Flight
was assigned over the weekend. Therefore, everyone should be familiar with the
story, and so will find your name- sometimes two people’s names- beside each of
the following. Take 15 minutes and write a thorough, detailed response, using
textual evidence and references to those literary elements, such as character,
setting, plot, tone and diction that best serve your response. We will then
discuss the story as a class.
1. Examples
of the long-term and immediate effects of the setting on the characters.
2. Sensory
details that help to paint a vivid portrait of the setting. (sight, smell,
taste, touch and hearing)
3. How
the “wild coast” affected the Torres family farm.
4. What
does the manner of the husband’s death suggest about the fates of the other
characters?
5. Why
the use of thee and thou?
6. Pepe’s
tone of voice with his mother- like a boy or a man?
7. Why
does Steinbeck use the word revolution to describe Pepe’s forthcoming trip to Monterey?
8. Agree
or disagree with Mama’s words: “A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed.”
9. Within
the context of the Spanish culture, defending one’s honor is considered an act
of machismo or manliness, while not doing so brings shame and humiliation for
the whole family. Why then does Pepe flee?
10. What is the symbolism of Pepe wearing his father’s
coat?
11. Steinbeck
describes first the mountains, then Pepe as misty and shadowy. Why?
12. What do the
black earth and the hollow sound of the hoof beats suggest about Pepe’s fate?
13. Why the
choice of a hawk for the bird that flies over the canyon?
14. What are
some indications that Pepe is losing some of his human dignity?
15. Why does Pepe kill the lizard?
16. How Pepe’s
movements like the mountain lion’s?
17. Why does
Pepe stand erect at the top of the mountain in full view of the hunters; why
doesn’t he run?
In Another Country—Ernest
Hemingway
In the fall the war was always
there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came
very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the
streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops,
and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails.
The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and
the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from
the mountains.
We were all at the
hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the
town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals,
but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to
enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman
sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire,
and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old
and very beautiful, and you entered a gate and walked across a courtyard and
out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the
courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we
met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the
matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.
The doctor came up to
the machine where I was sitting and said: "What did you like best to do
before the war? Did you practice a sport?"
I said: "Yes, football."
"Good," he said. "You will be able to play football again better
than ever."
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle
without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as riding
a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it
came to the bending part. The doctor said:" That will all pass. You are a
fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion."
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In
the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby's. He winked
at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two leather straps
that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff fingers, and said: "And
will I too play football, captain-doctor?" He had been a very great
fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.
The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a
photograph which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the
major's, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger.
The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very
carefully. "A wound?" he asked.
"An industrial accident," the doctor said.
"Very interesting, very interesting," the major said, and handed it
back to the doctor.
"You have confidence?"
"No," said the major.
There were three boys who came each day who were about the
same age I was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer,
and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and after
we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to the
Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked the short way through
the communist quarter because we were four together. The people hated us
because we were officers, and from a wine-shop someone called out, "A
basso gli ufficiali!" as we passed. Another boy who walked with us
sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face
because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out
to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after
he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face,
but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly
right. He went to South America and worked
in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know
how it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the
war, but that we were not going to it any more. We all had the same medals,
except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not
been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very
pale face who was to be a lawyer had been lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals
of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death
and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was
nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the
hospital. Although, as we walked to the Cova through the though part of town,
walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and
sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd
together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to et by,
we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they,
the people who disliked us, did not understand.
We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and
warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and
there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on
the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the
most patriotic people in Italy
were the café girls - and I believe they are still patriotic.
The
boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done
to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful
language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with
the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an
American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was
their friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really one of
them after they had read the citations, because it had been different with
them and they had done very different things to get their medals. I had been
wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was
really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and
sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all
the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night
through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying
to keep near the street lights, I knew that Ì would never have done such
things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by
myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when back to the front
again.
The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I
was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted;
they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good
friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because
he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be
accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not have
turned out to be a hawk either.
The major, who had been a great fencer, did not believe in bravery, and spent
much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar. He had
complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together very easily.
One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I
could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say.
"Ah, yes," the major said. "Why, then, do you not take up the
use of grammar?" So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was
such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the
grammar straight in my mind.
The major came very
regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am
sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us
believed in the machines, and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The
machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them. It was an
idiotic idea, he said, "a theory like another". I had not learned
my grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool
to have bothered with me. He was a small man and he sat straight up in his
chair with his right hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead
at the wall while the straps thumbed up and down with his fingers in them.
"What will you do when the was is over if it is
over?" he asked me. "Speak grammatically!"
"I will go to the States."
"Are you married?"
"No, but I hope to be."
"The more a fool you are," he said. He seemed very angry. "A
man must not marry."
"Why, Signor Maggiore?"
"Don't call me Signor Maggiore."
"Why must not a man marry?"
"He cannot marry. He cannot marry," he said angrily. "If he is
to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that.
He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he
cannot lose."
He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he
talked.
"But why should he necessarily lose it?"
"He'll lose it," the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then
he looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from between the
straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. "He'll lose it," he
almost shouted. "Don't argue with me!" Then he called to the
attendant who ran the machines. "Come and turn this damned thing
off."
He
went back into the other room for the light treatment and the massage. Then I
heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone and he shut the door.
When he came back into the room, I was sitting in another machine. He was
wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly toward my machine
and put his arm on my shoulder.
"I am sorry," he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good
hand. "I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must forgive
me."
"Oh-" I said, feeling sick for him. "I am so sorry."
He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult," he
said. "I cannot resign myself."
He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry.
"I am utterly unable to resign myself," he said and choked. And
then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and
soldierly, with tears on both cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the
machines and out the door.
The
doctor told me that the major's wife, who was very young and whom he had not
married until he was definitely invalided out of the war, had died of pneumonia.
She had been sick only a few days. No one expected her to die. The major did
not come to the hospital for three days. Then he came at the usual hour,
wearing a black band on the sleeve of his uniform. When he came back, there
were large framed photographs around the wall, of all sorts of wounds before
and after they had been cured by the machines. In front of the machine the
major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely
restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we
were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much
difference to the major because he only looked out of the window.
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