Monday, April 21 Flight by John Steinbeck

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."

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.