SCASI questions for Wednesday 7 September:
- •(Setting) What does the account of Norman Bowker’s and Henry Dobbins’ games of checkers contribute to the story?
- •(Character) How do the characters in this story demonstrate the different ways we have of dealing with a bad experience (both in living through it and in living with it afterwards)?
- •(Action) How does this story itself ‘put a spin’ on the war, and ‘make it dance’?
- •(Style) Discuss the effect of the ways in which Tim O’Brien opens his paragraphs in this story.
- •(Ideas) What does Tim O’Brien suggest here about the process and importance of story-telling?
- •(Setting) Examine the three landscapes Tim O’Brien establishes in this story – that of his home community, his own internal landscape, and the Rainy River setting where he must face his decision. How does Tim O’Brien use these three landscapes to give the story its tension?
- •(Character) What relationship does the narrator develop with us, his audience? What is the precise nature of the sympathy we may feel for him?
- •(Action) The eighteenth-century British novelist Laurence Sterne wrote, ‘No body, but he who has felt it, can conceive what a plaguing thing it is to have a man's mind torn asunder by two projects of equal strength, both obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same time.’ How successful is Tim O’Brien in conveying to us the ‘plaguing’ nature of his personal experience?
- •(Style) ‘This wasn’t a daydream. It was tangible and real.’ What elements in Tim O’Brien’s style make some of the events he records in this story tangible and real?
- •(Ideas) In this situation, O’Brien writes, ‘Intellect had come up against emotion’. Trace the struggle between the two as it is recorded in the story.
- •(Setting) What part does ‘the rear’ play in the lives of the platoon?
- •(Character) Try to explain Jensen’s behaviour at key points in this episode.
- •(Action) What are the ironies in the story?
- •(Style) What tone does Tim O’Brien adopt in his narrative?
- •(Ideas) What does this story suggest about the nature and causes of human conflict? Does Tim O’Brien, perhaps, want us to extrapolate those ideas from the personal to the national?
- •(Setting) How do Jensen and Strunk try to create certainty in this uncertain situation?
- •(Character) How do we sympathise with the two men in different ways?
- •(Action) Can we fully understand this story if we have not read Enemies?
- •(Style) What is the effect of the story’s minimalist dialogue?
- •(Ideas) What does the story suggest about comradeship?
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