Reading Response Prompts |
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These
prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read and
to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond
to any of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore,
you are free to write about that instead. Even if you choose
to pursue an idea of your own, however, or are not writing a response
that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about
each of the prompts in preparation for class. In any case, I
suggest doing the reading first, then checking the prompts. For
more information, review the listserv
assignment.
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| Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead:
“Part Two, Argil and Mold, Chapter 12” through “Part Three, Plant and Phantom, Chapter 8” |
Evaluate Hearn as an officer. What mistakes does he make? What mistakes does he accuse himself of? (Note that those are not the same question.) Does he learn from them? What is his worst mistake? Now, stop thinking of him as a human being, and begin to consider him as a literary character. Mailer has presumably written him for a particular purpose: to explore some theme that he considers important. What might that be? You need not think in terms of a moral or lesson; I do not consider The Naked and the Dead a didactic work. But clearly Mailer considers Hearn an important character to the novel as a whole. Why?
A shorter question, but a key one: Why does Hearn want to turn back? Why does Croft not want to?
We have two more “Time Machine” sections in this reading. Discuss either of them in the same terms we have been using (that is, character is destiny).
General Cummings’s experience with the howitzer crew leads him to write and draw in his journal. This scene allows us to see the workings of his mind in a more detailed and literally graphic way than we have before. What do we learn from this scene?
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