Here are the passages that you will be responsible for during our reading, analysis and discussion of this novel. The purpose of giving these passages to you now is so that as you read the novel, you will highlight, underline, and annotate them using the prose literature terms.
When annotating please follow this format:
(a) the identified rhetorical terms and modes of development
(b) a statement on the effect, impact, and value of the example
(c) a statement of the author’s purpose for using the identified term.
1. Chapter 1: “In through swinging doors I reached a marble foyer, and stopped at the foot of a long white marble flight of stairs. Although they were old stairs, the worn moons in the middle of each step were not very deep. The marble must be unusually hard. That seemed very likely, only too likely, although with all my thought about these stairs this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me. It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact.”
2. Chapter 1: “The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it. So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all –plus c’est la meme chose, plus ca change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even death by violence.”
3. Chapter 1: “Changed, I headed back through the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see that it was time to come in out of the rain.”
4. Chapter 2: “Phineas was the essence of this careless peace. Not that he was unconcerned about the war. After Mr. Prud’homme left he began to dress, that is he began reaching for whatever clothes were nearest, some of them mine. Then he stopped to consider, and went to the dresser. Out of one of the drawers he lifted a finely woven broadcloth shirt, carefully cut, and very pink.”
5. Chapter 3: “The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors risk being unpatriotic.”
6. Chapter 3: “It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth which contains the truth.”
7. Chapter 4: “The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing like sunshine seen through burlap. I looked over to see if Phineas was awake. He was asleep, although in this drained light he looked dead too, dead gray waves hissing mordantly along beach, which was gray and dead-looking itself.”
8. Chapter 4: “Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud. It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten.”
9. Chapter 5: “One evening when I was dressing for dinner in this numbed frame of mind, an idea occurred to me, the first with any energy behind it since Finny fell from the tree. I decided to put on his clothes. We wore the same size, and although he always criticized mine he used to wear them frequently, quickly forgetting what belonged to him and what to me. I never forgot, and that evening I put on his cordovan shoes, his pants, and I looked for and finally found his pink shirt, neatly laundered in a drawer. Its high, somewhat stiff collar against my neck, the wide cuffs touching my wrists, the rich material against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee.”
10. Chapter 5: “I couldn’t say anything to this sincere, drugged apology for having suspected the truth. He was never going to accuse me. It was only a feeling he had, and at this moment he must have been formulating a new commandment in his personal decalogue (look up this word!!!!!!!!!!): Never accuse a friend of a crime if you only have a feeling he did it.”
11. Chapter 6: “We never used this lower river, the Naguamsett, during the summer. It was ugly, saline, fringed with marsh, mud and seaweed…It was nothing like the fresh water Devon above the dam where we’d had so much fun, all the summer.”
12. Chapter 6: “So to Phineas I said, “I’m too busy for sports,” and he went into his incoherent groans and jumbles of words, and I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, “Listen, pal, if I can’t play sports, you’re going to play them for me,” and I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”
13. Chapter 7: “‘Doing away with his roommate so he could have a whole room to himself. Rankest treachery.’ He paused impressively. ‘Practically fratricide (look up this word!!!!!!!!!!!!!).’ With a snap of the neck I shook his hand off me, my teeth set, ‘Brinker…’ He raised an arresting hand. ‘Not a word. Not a sound. You’ll have your day in court.’”
14. Chapter 7: “Not that it would be a good life. The war would be deadly all right. But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if it wasn’t there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself. But in war, there was no question about it at all; it was there.”
15. Chapter 7: “I bounced zestfully up the dormitory stairs. Perhaps because my mind still retained the image of the sharp night stars, those few fixed points of light in the darkness, perhaps because of that the warm yellow light streaming from under my own door came as such a shock. It was a simple case of a change of expectation. The light should have been off. Instead, as though alive itself, it poured in a thin yellow slab of brightness from under the door, illuminating the dust and the splinters of the hall floor.”
16. Chapter 8: “So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power as size as it bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on the beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.”
NOTE: MORE PASSAGES WILL BE ASSIGNED LATER…PLEASE LISTEN FOR ANNOUNCMENTS.
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