A. Ask a question, the answer to which will help you and/or other students understand the story.
OR
B. Attempt to answer another student's question, even if you aren't sure of the answer (feel free to admit that you're not sure).
What if you think you understand everything about the story, and there are no questions to answer? Make up a helpful question anyway. If it's a "thought" question instead of a "fact" question--fine. Pretend you're an English teacher.
Please note that there will be a grammar quiz on Tuesday, and that the Cartier-Bresson analysis is due on Wednesday.
As I was reading this story, the actual events themselves that were occurring made sense, plane crash, family dinner, parties, fall in love with another woman, fight with wife, etc, but what I didn't understand was why it was happening. Did everything occurd because of the plane crash directly, did that somehow cause everything in the man's life to change. Or did it come indirectly from the plane crash, that near death experience snapped the man out of the "rut" he had been living in, so that everything he just kind of ignored and did out of habit suddenly wasn't something he could do with anymore? Or was there a different reason for all the events that occurred?
ReplyDeleteHeidi I think that near death experience snapped the man out of the "rut", because these things are rare to happen to someone. yes The man is changing because of the crash, but i think he is grateful he didn't die in a plane crash, well i mean if you look at the first 4 pages he talks to everyone he can talk to about this plane crash and how he survived it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely sure that I understood the point of this story. It seems like the entire story seems to be building up to something, like an unhappy man's eventual liberation from his tedious life, but it just comes full circle. He ends up in exactly the same place he started. I also don't understand the author's need to insert random events into the story, like the frisking at the psychiatrist's office, or recognizing the woman from the war. What's the point? Clearly the story is not thouroughly plot driven, but there wasn't really a clear development of the relationships either. I felt like the story was more a monument to sensory details and references to european art than anything else. Was there a message that was completely lost on me?
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ReplyDeleteI understood the individual events that took place, but i didn't really understand the relationship between any of them. I couldn't exactly explain the plot of this story. Maybe i didnt read it close enough or something like that but i basically just cant seem to come to a conclusion about this story. It seemed to me like a bunch of random events in one.
ReplyDeletep.s this is torrie everyone. i dont know why my e-mail is my name but ill try to fix it
I agree with Megan on this, It seems like ever since the mans near death plane crash the story is built up on his miserable experiences like the woman who was punished, there seems to be a constant display of conflict in the story. I think in a way the plane crash did heighten some of the conflict but did not cause it directly. Does anyone think there were some other indirect reasons to the conflict in the story?
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree the man's life changed, I think he was having a mid-life crisis, which happens to everyone like David said. The crush was an nearly-death experience, that made his mid-life crisis more serious. He thought that the accident was a big thing to him, and he was trying to tell his family the story of his nearly-death experience and how he survived, but nobody seemed to care and still life goes on... he was disappointed for his "new" life, which was survived from the crush. Then he met the girl Anne, fell in live with her, I am not sure he really loves her not not, maybe he just wanted to find something new from his boring life.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of imagery in the story and the descriptions of the author of the various events that occur are very nice. Although, the entire story just seems to be plot. It seems like an exciting story from the start. You expect some elaborate and heroic story of a man who survived a plane crash trying to come to the fact that he lost his wife or something along those lines. Although, it is not like that at all. The entire thing is just various events that occur in his life. Also, the story doesn't have a traditional shape. Usually, there is rising action and a climax which is followed by falling action. This is not the case for this story. It doesn't really seem as if there is a specific underlying message that I am supposed to receive from the author. Am I missing the point of this?
ReplyDeleteSo the story starts out with a plane crash and Francis Weed takes a taxi home. Why aren't the family members more interested in Francis's near-death experience? How could they not even care? Also, what is the importance of the two animals (cat and dog) in the story? They almost seem to come in at random moments...
ReplyDeleteI can't quite answer the questions above, so I will make an observation. While reading the story, I was struck by the ongoing quality of the tone of the writing and of the plot. It does not have the same structure as a traditional narrative, with a gradual buildup of events, a conflict, and a resolution. The plot of this story has more of a sense of everyday life, with the vivid descriptions of different events. This is very ironic because the events described in Cheever's narrative are dramatic interruptions in the life of his main character. The characterization of Francis' family leaves a little to be imagined about their identity: they seem like a typical 1950's postwar American family, but their experiences in the story are far from ordinary.
ReplyDeleteok, I had a question and wrote this last night but I was having a hard time to post my comment. My G mail account kept having a problem so it wouldn't let me post it.
ReplyDeleteso here's my question:
When I read the story, I didn't really understand what the dog 'Jupiter' is in this story. What is the significant of this dog? Because I felt that jupiter poped out of the story randomly for few times. Is this dog important to this story?
Heidi and Megan I agree with you on the fact that the plane crash did have an effect on him. Like David said he did talk about it for nearly 4 pages. But the fact that his daily life had become difficult, I got a sense that Francis was going stir crazy. Being trapped in a life of battling children, and too many parties, ran him thin and prone to upset the ones around him and himself.
ReplyDeleteViolent weather may crash a plane and kill hundreds at once, but a small breeze may as well rip apart thousand lives just as drastically, like the tip of touch that lets all the dominos fall down one by one. Just because the storm faded away doesn't mean that the breeze did too. It is the chicken and egg thing. Is the breeze a result of the storm or the storm the result of the breeze? Maybe the breeze is more catastrophic, as is suggested by the butterfly effect. Maybe the plane crash was a mere breeze to Francis' life. Maybe the trouble was always in Francis' stomach, and the breeze really ignited it. It upset his life rhythm. Francis needs to vomit.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, why the sudden shifts in tenses in the story?
I think the dog and cat are there to show a sense of normalcy that is reached at the end of the story, to show that despite everything that changed, their animal insticts and personalities are the same, and they are going to continue to do what they always did. The thing that im wondering is the significance of the little girl. I think the significance of the frisking at the psychiatrist was just to show how he was perceived as having become dangerous, and the recollection of the maid was to show how he was not absorbed in the love of his wife, but was able to recollect the woman's naked body without feeling guilty or uncomfortable about it, but he little girls seems sort of unnecessary to me. I think i was just trying to explain the other random parts of the story for the sake of explaination, i probably read a bit too much into them.
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ReplyDeleteCan human beings ever forget? What makes us so vulnerable might be the memories that force us to consent to our vulnerability.
ReplyDeleteOr, maybe the problem was always there, and the plane crash awakened Francis, and what Francis saw home was the mess he had made in the past, but now he saw them as mess because he experienced a life threatening event that renewed his vision towards life. But the remainings that were home stayed as they were. I'll shut up now.
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