Close reading assignment

Due Friday, November 21 at 4 p.m.

Choose a paragraph/passage from "The Bear," Cane, Ceremony, or "Brokeback Mountain" and write a 2-3 page close reading. In your analysis, focus on how and why the author (or narrator) uses specific words, images, and metaphors. Look up vocabulary and allusions that you're not certain of. Although your primary task is to examine and analyze this passage in detail, you should give some sense of the context of this passage in the larger work and connect the themes of this passage to the larger set of themes that we have discussed in class. Before you begin, you should go back and re-read the section surrounding your passage. You do not need to include a traditional introduction and conclusion for this paper.

Below are some suggested passages. Please feel free to use these or choose your own. If you select your own, please print it out and include it with your essay. Don't choose a passage that we've already discussed at length in class.

From "The Bear" (pp. 142-43)
His day came at last. In the surrey with his cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson he saw the wilderness through a slow drizzle of November rain just above the ice point as it seemed to him later he always saw it or at least always remembered it--the tall and endless wall of dense November woods under the dissolving afternoon and the year's death, sombre, impenetrable (he could not even discern yet how, at what point they could possibly hope to enter it even though he knew that Sam Fathers was waiting there with the wagon), the surrey moving through the skeleton stalks of cotton and corn in the last of open country, the last trace of man's puny gnawing into the immemorial flank, until, dwarfed by that perspective into an almost ridiculous diminishment, the surrey itself seemed to have ceased to move (this too to be completed later, years later, after he had grown to a man and seen the sea) as a solitary small boat hangs in lonely immobility, merely tossing up and down, in the infinite waste of the ocean while the water and then the apparently impenetrable land which it nears without appreciable progress, swings slowly and opens the widening inlet which is the anchorage. He entered it. Sam was waiting, wrapped in a quilt on the wagon seat behind the patient and steaming mules. He entered his novitiate to the true wilderness with Sam beside him as he had begun his apprenticeship in miniature to manhood after the rabbits and such with Sam beside him....

From "Fern," in Cane (p. 17)
Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia's South. A young Negro, once, was looking at her, spellbound, from the road. A white man passing in a buggy had to flick him with his whip if he was going to get by without running him over. I first saw her on her porch. I was passing with a fellow whose crusty numbness (I was from the North and suspected of being prejudiced and stuck-up) was melting as he found me warm. I asked him who she was. "That's Fern," was all that I could get from him. Some folks already thought that I was given to nosing around; I let it go at that, so far as questions were concerned. But at first sight of her I felt as if I heard a Jewish cantor sing. As if his singing rose above the unheard chorus of a folk-song. And I felt bound to her. I too had my dreams: something I would do for her. I have knocked about from town to town too much not to know the futility of mere change of place. Besides, picture if you can, this cream-colored solitary girl sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem. Better that she listen to folk-songs at dusk in Georgia, you would sawy, and so would I.

From "Brokeback Mountain" (p. 278)
Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable--admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears--rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees.
"Jesus," said Jack. "Ennis?" But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they'd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.

From Ceremony (p. 226 in my version)
The yellow bull grazed in open view, but the speckled cows stayed in the juniper, listening like deer to Tayo's approach, their spotted hides blending into the sandy talus of the big mesa. Gradually they appeared, cautiously joining the yellow bull. Tayo sat motionless with his back against the small cottonwood tree growing in the wash. The cows kept their bodies between him and the new calves, but occasionally a calf bolted away, bucking and leaping in a wide arc, returning finally to its mother when it was tired of playing. Tayo's heart beat fast; he could see Josiah's vision emerging, he could see the story taking form in bone and muscle.