American Texts II

Use this table to find explanations for fifteen practice questions. Try answering from a short passage as well as from memory.

Pound (“With Usura”) and Plath (“The Applicant”) also have practice questions in their entries.

Comparison for question 2 — Twain and Heart of Darkness: both authors attacked the same atrocity — King Leopold II's exploitation of the Congo Free State. Conrad drew on his own 1890 Congo journey for Heart of Darkness (1899); Twain, a vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, satirised Leopold directly in the pamphlet "King Leopold's Soliloquy" (1905). So the connection is a shared anti-imperialist exposure of the Congo horror, one novelistic and oblique, one satirical and frontal. (Related sample-test MC: Twain's "The War Prayer" responds to the Philippine–American War, ended 1902 — not the Civil War, not WWI.)

Useful comparisons:

• War-related readings: Twain ("The War Prayer"), Malamud ("Armistice"), Salinger ("Bananafish"), Roth ("Defender of the Faith"), Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) — the pool for question 8.
• The 1948 pair: "Bananafish" (The New Yorker, 31 Jan 1948) and "The Lottery" (The New Yorker, 26 June 1948) — same year, same magazine (question 10).
• Fading Southern Belle pair: Emily Grierson and Blanche DuBois (question 7).
• Symbolism pair: Gatsby and Streetcar (question 6).
• A striking verbal echo: Malamud's home-front bully Gus Wagner ("I'm a hundred percent American. I fought in the war.") and Williams's Stanley Kowalski ("one hundred percent American") both plant their aggression in the same nativist boast — two 1940s texts, one idiom.

• What it is: Canto XLV of Pound's lifelong epic The Cantos, published in The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) and known by its refrain "With Usura". The poem is a sustained curse against usury (lending at interest, for Pound the emblem of finance capitalism), cataloguing everything it corrupts: no one gets "a house of good stone", no "painted paradise on his church wall", bread becomes "dry as paper", craftsmen are severed from their crafts, and art is "made to sell and sell quickly". Against this it rolls out a counter-catalogue of pre-usura achievement — Duccio, Piero della Francesca, Bellini, Fra Angelico, the churches of St Trophime and Saint Hilaire. It climaxes in the accusation that usury is a sin against nature itself and ends with images of defiled fertility and death.

• Themes & motifs:

  • Usury as a force CONTRA NATURAM — against nature and natural increase.
  • Good economy = good art and good craft; bad money severs the maker from the made.
  • Sterility vs. fertility: usura "slayeth the child in the womb", lies "between the young bride and her bridegroom".
  • The sacred profaned: "They have brought whores for Eleusis" — commerce defiling the ancient fertility mysteries.
  • Death feasting on life: "Corpses are set to banquet".

• Form & devices:

  • Free-verse litany driven by anaphora ("with usura… with usura…").
  • Deliberately archaic, Bible-flavoured grammar (hath, seeth, slayeth, gnaweth) — the voice of timeless moral law, not one man's opinion.
  • Catalogue technique: a negative catalogue of harms answered by a positive catalogue of Renaissance artists and buildings.
  • The craftsman's signature "Adamo me fecit" ("Adam made me") as the emblem of honest, named work; biblical diction such as "murrain" (cattle plague).
  • Pound's own appended footnote defines usury: "A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production… (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)"

• Context & significance: Pound (1885–1972), American expatriate, founder of Imagism, editor of Eliot's The Waste Land (which is dedicated to him as il miglior fabbro), and the great impresario of Anglo-American Modernism. Read the canto as Imagist method scaled up: evocative concrete images made to carry an abstract argument — a lament, not a treatise in economy. By the 1930s Pound's economics (influenced by C. H. Douglas's Social Credit) had fused with his support for Mussolini; during WWII he made pro-Fascist Rome Radio broadcasts, was arrested for treason in 1945, caged at Pisa, and confined in St Elizabeths psychiatric hospital 1946–58 (Bollingen Prize controversy, 1949). The usury obsession fed his antisemitism — the canto itself names no Jews, but its rhetoric cannot be fully separated from that context, and late in life Pound conceded he had mistaken a symptom (usury) for the cause (avarice).

• Remember:

  • Canto XLV; published in The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937).
  • "Usura" = usury; Pound's own footnote defines it and blames it for "the failure of the Medici bank".
  • The Latin hinge: CONTRA NATURAM ("against nature").
  • Read it as a lament, not a treatise in economy.
  • Pound: Imagism, il miglior fabbro, Rome Radio, Pisa 1945, St Elizabeths 1946–58.

• Quotable:

  • "With usura hath no man a house of good stone"
  • "Usura slayeth the child in the womb"

Exam angles

(no direct bank question — prepare these plausible ones)

• What it is: The opening poem of North of Boston (1914). Every spring the speaker and his neighbour meet to rebuild the stone wall between their New England farms, replacing boulders that winter (and hunters) have brought down. The speaker teases that the wall is needless — "He is all pine and I am apple orchard", there are no cows — and muses that "Something there is that doesn't love a wall"; the neighbour only repeats his father's proverb, "Good fences make good neighbors." The poem ends with the neighbour, stones in both hands, "like an old-stone savage armed", contentedly repeating the saying.

• Themes & motifs:

  • Barriers between people — physical and mental.
  • Tradition versus questioning: a critique of conservatism and blind reliance on tradition.
  • Community ritual as both bond and separation: the wall-mending brings the two men together once a year.
  • Nature as an anti-wall force: frost heaves, the "frozen-ground-swell".
  • Inherited language doing people's thinking for them: "He will not go behind his father's saying".

• Form & devices:

  • 45 lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in a single verse paragraph; conversational New England idiom over strict metre — Frost's "sound of sense".
  • Personification: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it"; the boulders are told "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
  • Symbol/allegory: the wall is a real stone wall and a figure for every barrier people build out of distrust.
  • Irony: it is the speaker who initiates the mending each year ("I let my neighbor know beyond the hill") — the sceptic maintains the very wall he mocks.
  • The speaker describes the neighbour as moving in more than literal darkness, but qualifies this with "as it seems to me". The image supports the speaker's criticism of inherited habits while also exposing his judgement; it is not an omniscient verdict from Frost.

• Context & significance: Frost (1874–1963), born in San Francisco, farmed at Derry, New Hampshire, and broke through in England (A Boy's Will, 1913; North of Boston, 1914). Four Pulitzer Prizes; read at Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. He is a Modernist-era poet who kept traditional forms and rural subjects while building in Modernist ambiguity — which is exactly what question 1 tests. The proverb itself is older than Frost; the poem stages it rather than endorses it — but note that the poem does not simply damn walls either: it leaves the argument between mischief and maxim unresolved.

• Remember:

  • Opening poem of North of Boston (1914); blank verse, one continuous paragraph, 45 lines.
  • The proverb appears twice (middle and final line): "Good fences make good neighbors" — US spelling neighbors.
  • The counter-line also appears twice: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
  • "He moves in darkness as it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees."
  • Speaker = apple orchard; neighbour = pine.

• Quotable:

  • "Something there is that doesn't love a wall"
  • "Good fences make good neighbors."

Exam angles

• What it is: First published in the Atlantic Monthly (August 1915) and placed as the opening poem of Mountain Interval (1916). A traveller in an autumn wood faces a fork, looks down one road, takes the other — "as just as fair" — telling himself he keeps the first for another day though he doubts he will ever return. In the final stanza he imagines retelling the moment "with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence", claiming he took "the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference."

• Themes & motifs:

  • Choice and its irreversibility: "way leads on to way".
  • Self-narration — how we retrospectively dramatise arbitrary decisions into destiny.
  • The gap between fact and memory: the poem states twice that the roads were effectively identical ("the passing there / Had worn them really about the same"; "both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black") — which the future self will conveniently forget.
  • The fork as an allegory of any life decision (beyond a physical crossroads).

• Form & devices:

  • Four five-line stanzas rhymed ABAAB in a loose iambic tetrameter.
  • First-person dramatic monologue whose speaker is gently unreliable.
  • The title points at the road not taken — regret and counterfactual, not triumph.
  • The "sigh" is calculatedly ambiguous (satisfaction? regret?); the future-tense self-quotation ("I shall be telling this…") frames the famous last lines as a prediction of a story he will tell, not a fact about the roads.
  • Symbolism: the yellow wood (autumn, lateness), the diverging roads (life choices), the untrodden leaves (unknown futures).

• Context & significance: Frost wrote it after his years in England, teasing his friend the poet Edward Thomas, who on their walks always sighed over the path they had not taken; Thomas took the joke seriously enough that it played a part in his decision-making (he enlisted in 1915 and died at Arras in 1917). Frost reportedly warned audiences it was "a tricky poem". It is now proverbially the most misread poem in America (critic David Orr wrote a whole book on the misreading): popular culture quotes it as an anthem of individualism, while the text itself documents how such anthems get manufactured after the fact.

• Remember:

  • Atlantic Monthly, August 1915; opens Mountain Interval (1916).
  • Four ABAAB quintains; the sameness of the roads is stated twice.
  • Written as a tease of Edward Thomas (killed at Arras, 1917).
  • Title = the road not taken (regret), not "the road less traveled".
  • Frost: "a tricky poem" — the ending is a projected self-mythology.

• Quotable:

  • "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood"
  • "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference."

Exam angles

• What it is: An eighteen-line free-verse poem, first published in March 1925 in Survey Graphic — the special Harlem number edited by Alain Locke — and then collected in Hughes's first book The Weary Blues (1926), where it appears as "Epilogue". The speaker, "the darker brother", is sent "to eat in the kitchen / When company comes", but he laughs, eats well and grows strong; "Tomorrow, / I'll be at the table" and nobody will dare object — "Besides, / They'll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed". It opens "I, too, sing America" and closes "I, too, am America."

• Themes & motifs:

  • African American claim to full national belonging.
  • Segregation figured as household etiquette: kitchen vs. table, "company".
  • Dignity, patience and growing strength rather than plea or apology.
  • Prophecy: "Tomorrow" as certain emancipation.
  • Beauty as an argument (anticipating "Black is beautiful"); shame transferred from the excluded to the excluders.

• Form & devices:

  • Short-lined free verse, plain diction, no rhyme — the power is in line-breaks and the pivot words "Tomorrow" and "Besides".
  • Synecdoche/allegory: the "I" is representative — one voice standing for the African American community, the household standing for the nation.
  • Intertextual reply to Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing": Hughes adds the voice Whitman's catalogue left out — the opening "I, too, sing America" answers Whitman directly.
  • The shift from "sing America" (participation) to "am America" (identity) is the poem's whole argument in two verbs.

• Context & significance: Hughes (1902, Joplin, Missouri – 1967), central poet of the Harlem Renaissance — the flowering of African American arts in 1920s Harlem fed by the Great Migration northward. Hughes championed black vernacular, jazz and blues forms, and racial pride (essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", 1926). The Survey Graphic Harlem issue (March 1925) grew into Locke's anthology The New Negro — publishing "I, Too" there placed the poem at the movement's founding moment. Bank Q1 offers Hughes as the alternative to Frost for the symbolism/allegory question.

• Remember:

  • First published March 1925, Survey Graphic (Alain Locke's special Harlem issue).
  • Collected in The Weary Blues (1926) as "Epilogue".
  • Answer-poem to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing".
  • Frame lines: "I, too, sing America." → "I, too, am America."
  • Harlem Renaissance: 1920s Harlem, Great Migration, Locke's The New Negro.

• Quotable:

  • "I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother."
  • "I, too, am America."

Exam angles

• What it is: Written on 11 October 1962 in the astonishing burst that produced most of Ariel (published posthumously, 1965, edited by Ted Hughes). A salesman-like speaker interviews an applicant — first checking he is suitably incomplete ("First, are you our sort of a person?" — any glass eye, rubber breasts, missing parts?), then fitting him with a black suit, and finally marketing the product on offer: a wife. The woman is summoned "out of the closet", praised as an appliance that "can sew… can cook… can talk, talk, talk", guaranteed to appreciate like an asset — silver in twenty-five years, gold in fifty — while the refrain hammers: "Will you marry it, marry it, marry it."

• Themes & motifs:

  • Marriage as a commercial transaction and social conscription.
  • The wife reduced to a commodity — the poem's most brutal stroke is the pronoun: the bride is consistently "it", a "living doll".
  • Conformity: the suit "black and stiff" that fits everybody.
  • The body as a set of replaceable parts.
  • The emptiness of both parties: the applicant qualifies by lack (an empty hand, an empty head) and is prescribed a wife the way one is prescribed a poultice for a hole.

• Form & devices:

  • Eight five-line free-verse stanzas in the register of a sales pitch / job interview — imperatives, guarantees, warranty periods.
  • Insistent, jingle-like repetition: "It can talk, talk, talk"; "marry it, marry it, marry it".
  • Dramatic monologue with a silent addressee, implicating the reader as the applicant.
  • Dark humour and mounting hysteria under the ad-speak surface; the "living doll" image fusing toy, automaton and bride.
  • In a script for a BBC reading Plath glossed the speaker as a kind of executive super-salesman vetting candidates for the "product" — marriage.

• Context & significance: Plath (1932, Boston – 11 February 1963, London); Smith College, Fulbright to Cambridge, married Ted Hughes 1956; The Colossus (1960), The Bell Jar (January 1963, as "Victoria Lucas"); Collected Poems won a posthumous Pulitzer (1982). She is grouped with the Confessional poets (she attended Robert Lowell's Boston seminar alongside Anne Sexton), though "The Applicant" is less confession than social satire. It anticipates by months the argument of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) — the suburban wife as manufactured role — a useful comparison with The Hours (§16).

• Remember:

  • Written October 1962; in Ariel (1965), published posthumously by Ted Hughes.
  • The bride is called "it" throughout; key coinage: "A living doll".
  • Register: sales pitch / job interview; refrain "Will you marry it, marry it, marry it."
  • Same month as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus"; Plath died February 1963.
  • Pairs ideologically with Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963).

• Quotable:

  • "First, are you our sort of a person?"
  • "A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk."

Exam angles

(no direct bank question — prepare these plausible ones)

• What it is: Published April 1925 (Scribner's; working title Trimalchio). Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner selling bonds in New York in the summer of 1922, rents a West Egg cottage beside the mansion of Jay Gatsby, host of vast anonymous parties. Gatsby — born James Gatz, a poor North Dakota boy remade by ambition and by bootlegging money (his associate Meyer Wolfshiem "fixed the World's Series") — has built it all to win back Daisy Buchanan, now married to the brutal old-money Tom, across the bay in East Egg. Nick brokers the reunion; the affair collapses in a Plaza Hotel confrontation, after which Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, kills Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson. Tom points Myrtle's husband George at Gatsby, who is shot in his pool; almost no one comes to the funeral, and Nick returns West, closing on the green light and the boats against the current.

• Themes & motifs:

  • The American Dream perverted (see question 3 below).
  • Old money vs. new money (East Egg vs. West Egg) and the carelessness of the rich — "careless people" who "retreated back into their money".
  • The past's irrecoverability: "Can't repeat the past?… Why of course you can!"
  • Illusion and idolatry — Daisy as the dream's unworthy object: "Her voice is full of money."
  • Moral wasteland — the valley of ashes; surveillance without God — the fading billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

• Form & devices:

  • Retrospective first-person peripheral narrator (Nick), partial and self-flattering ("inclined to reserve all judgments"), which makes Gatsby a rumour before he is a man.
  • Scenic, elliptical construction with delayed exposition — Gatsby's true biography arrives in fragments.
  • Symbolism (question 6): the green light at the end of Daisy's dock (the dream, longing, the "orgastic future"); the valley of ashes (industrial waste of the boom, moral consequence dumped on the poor); Eckleburg's eyes (an advertisement mistaken for God — Wilson: "God sees everything"); the two Eggs (caste line inside wealth); Gatsby's shirts and yellow car (money as display and as murder weapon).
  • Lyrical prose over a hard plot skeleton.

• Context & significance: Fitzgerald (1896–1940) named the Jazz Age and was its representative writer and casualty. Consider the Prohibition mechanism: Gatsby's fortune exists because Puritan-minded prohibitionists collided with Jazz Age appetite — the bootlegger is the era's true self-made man. The novel sold modestly in 1925 and was canonised after WWII; it is now the standard text for the corruption of the self-made ideal: Ben Franklin's self-improvement schedule survives parodically in young Gatz's timetable written in a Hopalong Cassidy cover.

• Remember:

  • April 1925, Scribner's; narrator Nick Carraway; summer 1922.
  • Gatsby = James Gatz, North Dakota; mentor Dan Cody; money via bootlegging with Meyer Wolfshiem.
  • Geography: West Egg (new money) / East Egg (old money) / valley of ashes between them and New York.
  • Symbols to name in the exam: green light, valley of ashes, Eckleburg's eyes.
  • Daisy drives the car that kills Myrtle; George Wilson shoots Gatsby, then himself.

• Quotable:

  • "Her voice is full of money."
  • "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Exam angles

• What it is: Faulkner's first story in a national magazine (The Forum, April 1930; collected in These 13, 1931). In Jefferson (Yoknapatawpha County), Miss Emily Grierson dies at seventy-four and the town narrates her life out of order: the aristocratic father who drove away her suitors; Colonel Sartoris's chivalric remission of her taxes (1894) and her later routing of the modern aldermen who try to collect; the terrible smell around the house (neighbours secretly sprinkle lime); her Yankee beau, day-labour foreman Homer Barron; her purchase of arsenic "for rats"; Homer's disappearance. After the funeral the town breaks open a sealed upstairs room and finds Homer's corpse in the bridal bed — and on the second pillow, "a long strand of iron-gray hair."

• Themes & motifs:

  • The Old South refusing to die — Emily as "a fallen monument", "a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town".
  • Time and denial: she denies her father's death for three days; the invisible watch ticking in her pocket; the sealed room as stopped time.
  • The town's complicity — chivalry, curiosity and cowardice let the horror happen.
  • One symbolic reading of necrophilia: holding on to that which is dead = clinging to the past.
  • North vs. South: Homer the Northern labourer paving Southern sidewalks; isolation as both imposition and choice.

• Form & devices:

  • First-person plural narrator "we" — the communal town voice: gossiping, unreliable, implicated.
  • Jumbled chronology in five sections (opens with the funeral, loops back decades, enters the room only at the end), forcing the reader to reassemble time — an example of flashback/flash-ahead construction.
  • Gothic apparatus relocated to a Mississippi street: decaying mansion, secret chamber, corpse-bride.
  • Foreshadowing (smell, arsenic, Homer's vanishing) that only clicks retrospectively.
  • Allegory and hyperbole (question 5): Emily allegorises the Old South itself, and the town's language is systematically hyperbolic — the "fallen monument", the "hereditary obligation".

• Context & significance: Faulkner (1897–1962), Nobel Prize 1949 (presented 1950), built his fictional Yoknapatawpha County out of Oxford, Mississippi. The story is the standard classroom case of Southern Gothic and of Modernist narrative technique applied to the short story — the sample MC even asks which device is least typical of Faulkner (answer: linear chronology). The title, Faulkner explained, is the narrator's gesture of pity — a rose for a woman to whom life gave nothing.

• Remember:

  • The Forum, April 1930; collected in These 13 (1931); Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha.
  • Narrator = the town, "we"; five sections, non-linear.
  • Names: Homer Barron (Yankee foreman), Colonel Sartoris (tax remission, 1894), Tobe (Emily's Black servant).
  • Emily dies at 74; arsenic bought "for rats"; the closing image: a long strand of iron-gray hair.
  • Sample-MC trap: Faulkner's least typical device = linear chronology.

• Quotable:

  • "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral" (opening)
  • "…we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair." (closing)

Exam angles

• What it is: First published in the Paris little magazine transition (August 1927), then in Men Without Women (1927). At a rail junction in the Ebro valley, on the line between Barcelona and Madrid, an American man and a girl he calls Jig drink beer and Anís del Toro while waiting forty minutes for the express. Their small talk — she says the distant hills look "like white elephants" — is a duel over something never named: he presses her to have "an awfully simple operation", she asks whether things can be as they were and whether he will still love her; she finally begs him, with seven "pleases", to stop talking. He carries the bags to the far track; asked if she feels better, she answers: "I feel fine… There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."

• Themes & motifs:

  • The unspoken abortion and the impossibility of honest speech.
  • A relationship at a junction — two rails, two directions, choose.
  • Fertility vs. sterility staged by the landscape: the barren, treeless side toward the hills vs. the river and fields of grain on the other.
  • The white elephant — an unwanted, burdensome gift: the pregnancy as he sees it; perhaps the relationship as she comes to see it.
  • Male pressure disguised as reasonableness ("I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to"); drinking as avoidance ("That's all we do, isn't it — look at things and try new drinks?").

• Form & devices:

  • The classic demonstration of the iceberg method / theory of omission (Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932: the dignity of the story's movement is underwater — only an eighth shows).
  • Much of the story is dialogue, often with simple speech tags; sustained interior monologue and a full explanation of the dispute are withheld. Adverbs do occur: Jig smiles "brightly", and the waiting passengers are described as behaving "reasonably". Minimalism means selective explanation, not a ban on adjectives, adverbs or narration. The word abortion never occurs.
  • The reader must infer everything — minimalism makes the reader construct the implications.
  • The few narrated details are all load-bearing symbols: the two lines of rails, the bead curtain (with its Anís del Toro label), the luggage with "labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights", the divided landscape.
  • The ending is a masterclass in irony: "I feel fine" closes the story without closing the question.

• Context & significance: Hemingway (1899–1961), ambulance driver wounded in WWI, Paris expatriate in Gertrude Stein's "Lost Generation" (disillusioned expatriates in Paris, not war veterans as such), Nobel Prize 1954. His stripped style — short declaratives, concrete nouns, repetition instead of ornament — reshaped 20th-century prose; the sample MC asks what is least typical of him: an opulent style heavy with adjectives and adverbs. The story is also a set text for gender-reading: Jig sees the hills, the man sees the problem.

• Remember:

  • transition, August 1927 → Men Without Women (1927).
  • Setting: rail junction, Ebro valley, Spain; express Barcelona→Madrid; 40-minute wait.
  • The girl is Jig; drinks: beer and Anís del Toro; the operation is never named.
  • Iceberg theory formulated in Death in the Afternoon (1932).
  • Seven "pleases": "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"

• Quotable:

  • "It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig… It's not really an operation at all."
  • "I feel fine… There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."

Exam angles

• What it is: One of Malamud's earliest stories, written in mid-1940 in immediate response to the fall of France; unpublished in his lifetime, it appeared posthumously in The People and Uncollected Stories (1989, ed. Robert Giroux; now also in The Complete Stories, 1997).

  • Setup: Morris Lieberman, a Jewish widower who owns a small grocery-delicatessen in a Scandinavian neighbourhood of Brooklyn, saw as a fifteen-year-old in Russia a peasant crush a fleeing Jewish sexton's spine with a wagon wheel during a pogrom; thirty years later, the Nazi conquests revive that terror. He lives glued to the radio through May–June 1940 — Sedan, the Belgian surrender, Dunkirk, the fall of Paris, Pétain's request for "peace with honor", Hitler receiving the French in Marshal Foch's railway carriage at Compiègne — praying for a French victory in what he calls "this righteous war". His anxieties are watched over by his thin, studious fourteen-year-old son Leonard, who minds the counter while his father naps and begs him to stop listening. The menace has a local face: Gus Wagner, the meat-delivery man — American-born, an AEF veteran of 1918 — who keeps a scrapbook of German victories, worships the Panzer divisions, and needles Morris daily ("You better get used to it, Morris. The Germans will wipe out the Frenchman."). Gus and Morris have done business for nine years and were nearly friends after Morris's wife died; Leonard, who checks Gus's error-ridden bills, has driven them apart.
  • The armistice and the confrontation: The night the armistice is announced Morris cannot sleep; he dreams of falling from a Paris ledge as the Nazis close in, then of Gus in the crowded store waving Father Coughlin's Social Justice and crying "The Protocols of Zion!" until the customers leave. Next afternoon the two men collide: Morris asks "What great cause has died?", Gus sneers at Leonard ("your skinny kid", the bill "signed by a certified public accountant"), and when Morris retorts that Gus will never hear "good mathematics student" said of his own children, Gus explodes — "What the hell's the matter with you Jews? Do you think you own all the brains in the world?" Morris: "Gus, you talk like a Nazi." Gus: "I'm a hundred percent American. I fought in the war." When Gus claims the French "deserved to lose" and are only defended because they protect "the Jews — like that lousy Leon Blum", Morris shouts "You Nazi, you… You don't deserve to live in America!" — and Gus shoves the intervening Leonard aside ("Mind your own business, you little bastard").
  • The ending: The boy's sob stops everything: Gus sees "that he had gone too far"; Morris, white-faced, embraces and kisses his son, promising "No more, Leonard… I give you my word. No more." Gus — mainly afraid of losing the account — leaves the meat ("Pay me tomorrow") and drives off. The story ends inside Gus's head: the sight of the weeping boy and embracing father only confirms his contempt ("It was always like that with the Jews. Tears and people holding each other. Why feel sorry for them?"), and he fantasises that his truck is a tank rumbling through Paris boulevards, the French cowed on the sidewalks — "He drove tensely, his eyes unsmiling. He knew that if he relaxed the picture would fade."

• Themes & motifs:

  • The continuity of antisemitism across continents — pogrom Russia → Nazi Europe → a Brooklyn delivery man (the wagon wheel of the pogrom quietly rhyming with Gus's fantasised tank wheels).
  • The home front as a miniature battlefield: the war is fought over a delicatessen counter.
  • Mediated suffering — the radio as Morris's wound and lifeline: "in listening he shared the woes inflicted upon his race".
  • Jewish history as "an interminable exodus" — Morris's night-thought of long lines trudging with bundles.
  • Father–son tenderness as the story's moral centre and its answer to force.
  • The fragility of fascist self-intoxication — Gus's empowering "picture" must be gripped or it fades.
  • Commerce as armed truce — Gus censors himself "because he considered his business first".

• Form & devices:

  • Compact third-person realism, focalised through Morris for most of its length and then — crucially — handed to Gus for the final paragraphs, so the story closes inside the mind it condemns.
  • Historical montage: the real timeline of May–June 1940 structures the plot.
  • Two dream sequences doing psychological exposition: the persecution nightmare, and the Social Justice / "Protocols of Zion" dream (Coughlin's antisemitic weekly, which really did circulate the Protocols).
  • Dialogue as duel, with the era's slogans ("a hundred percent American") deployed as weapons.
  • The title's double irony: the Compiègne armistice of 22 June 1940 was staged in the same railway carriage as the armistice of 11 November 1918 — the war Gus fought in; and "armistice" also names the false peace Morris and Gus resume at the end ("The meat's on the table… Pay me tomorrow"): not reconciliation, only a ceasefire that business requires.

• Context & significance: Malamud (1914–1986), Brooklyn-born son of Russian-Jewish immigrant grocers — the store in the story is his parents' world, and it prefigures The Assistant (1957). Read "Armistice" in two contexts: WWII reflected in American fiction (with Heller, Mailer, Roth) and Jewish-American literature's "Remembering Europe" strand (with I. B. Singer): a pogrom survivor, "relatively safe in Brooklyn", listening to Europe collapse by radio. Written when the events were weeks old, it is that rarity — American fiction of the Holocaust's prologue composed inside the moment, before hindsight. Malamud's later career: The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), The Magic Barrel (1958; National Book Award), The Fixer (1966; Pulitzer + NBA), his classic novel of European (Russian) antisemitism. Leon Blum, whom Gus slurs, was France's Jewish former prime minister — the reference dates the prejudice precisely.

• Remember:

  • Written mid-1940; first published posthumously in The People and Uncollected Stories (1989).
  • Morris Lieberman, Jewish grocer-delicatessen owner, widower, Scandinavian neighbourhood, Brooklyn; witnessed a Russian pogrom at fifteen (wagon wheel, dying sexton).
  • Son Leonard, 14, studious, won a five-dollar mathematics prize; minds the store; "Pa, don't fight."
  • Gus Wagner, meat deliveryman; American-born AEF veteran of 1918; scrapbook of German victories; Panzer worship.
  • Historical spine: Sedan (May 1940) → Dunkirk → Paris falls → Pétain, Compiègne, armistice 22 June 1940 in Foch's railway carriage.
  • The ending belongs to Gus's tank fantasy, which fades if he relaxes.

• Quotable:

  • "Gus, you talk like a Nazi." — "I'm a hundred percent American. I fought in the war."
  • "He knew that if he relaxed the picture would fade." (final line)

Exam angles

• What it is: The New Yorker, 31 January 1948; the opening story of Nine Stories (1953) and the foundation of the Glass family saga. In a Florida resort hotel, Muriel Glass — nails lacquered, reading a women's-magazine article called "Sex Is Fun—or Hell" — reassures her panicked mother by long-distance phone that her husband Seymour, a veteran recently released from an Army hospital, is fine, despite "the trees" business with the car and the rest ("Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948," she reports him calling her). On the beach, Seymour talks with a small girl, Sybil Carpenter ("See more glass"), and tells her the fable of the bananafish: ordinary-looking fish that swim into a banana hole, gorge — "as many as seventy-eight bananas" — swell with banana fever, cannot get out, and die. They wade in, he kisses the arch of her foot, returns to the hotel, accuses a woman in the elevator of staring at his feet, enters the room where Muriel sleeps, takes an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic from his luggage, "looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple."

• Themes & motifs:

  • The unassimilable war veteran in booming consumer America — a WWII veteran who cannot adjust to the consumerist America of the late 1940s.
  • Materialism as spiritual disease — the bananafish fable as a parable of glut: gorge on the world and you cannot get back out.
  • Childhood and adult relationships contrasted: Seymour talks playfully with Sybil, but the story also shows jealousy, unease and miscommunication around that encounter.
  • Incommunicability: the phone call and the beach dialogue never touch.
  • The difficulty of interpreting Seymour: the affectionate beach conversation, reports of alarming behaviour and abrupt ending resist reduction to either a saintly outsider or a single diagnosis.

• Form & devices:

  • Rigorous scenic construction in two halves — Muriel's phone call (the adult, acquisitive world discussing Seymour in his absence) and Seymour with Sybil (his own world) — hinged by the elevator scene and detonated by a one-sentence ending with zero interiority.
  • Salinger withholds diagnosis and motive entirely — an omission technique in Hemingway's line.
  • The fable-within-the-story as the interpretive key the characters themselves don't use.
  • Brilliant dialogue mimicry: Muriel's mother's anaphoric worries; Sybil's "see more glass".
  • Symbols: bananafish (glut), the sea (childhood, depth), Seymour's pallor and robe vs. the tanned resort crowd, the "seventy-eight bananas" of terminal consumption.

• Context & significance: Salinger (1919–2010) landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, fought through the Hürtgen Forest, worked in counter-intelligence and was hospitalised for combat stress in 1945 — this biographical context makes a war-trauma reading relevant, but does not give readers direct access to Seymour's motive or establish that his experience is identical to Salinger's. The story made Salinger's name, led to The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and seeded the Glass family cycle (Franny and Zooey; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour: An Introduction), which retro-fits Seymour as guru and saint. Salinger can also be compared with the Beats in his revolt against postwar consumerism.

• Remember:

  • The New Yorker, 31 January 1948; opens Nine Stories (1953).
  • Names: Seymour Glass, Muriel, Sybil Carpenter; Florida resort hotel (room 507).
  • The weapon: Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic; death by a shot through the right temple, beside sleeping Muriel.
  • Fable numbers: 78 bananas; banana fever.
  • "Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948" = Seymour's name for Muriel.

• Quotable:

  • "Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple." (final sentence)
  • "Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948"

Exam angles

• What it is: The New Yorker, 26 June 1948. On the clear, sunny morning of June 27th, the three hundred villagers of an unnamed American town gather in the square between the post office and the bank for an annual event that takes "less than two hours". Mr. Summers administers a shabby black wooden box of paper slips; boys have already stockpiled stones. Heads of households draw; Bill Hutchinson draws the marked slip, and his wife Tessie — who arrived late, joking — begins protesting the procedure. In the second, family round, Tessie draws the slip with the black spot. Her neighbours and her own children close in: "'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."

• Themes & motifs:

  • Ritual scapegoating — an ordinary community's institutionalised human sacrifice (the sample MC's key: the "lottery" entails a ritual sacrifice).
  • Collective cruelty normalized as civic routine: familiar neighbours joke and exchange news before taking part in a stoning. Ordinary manners do not make their conduct innocent.
  • Tradition emptied of meaning yet lethal: the chant and salute long lost; the box "grew shabbier each year" yet cannot be replaced.
  • Superstition and agriculture — Old Man Warner's "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon".
  • The victim's selective conscience: Tessie objects only when it strikes her family — she even wants her married daughter included in the draw.
  • Violence latent in the mundane: children gathering stones as play.

• Form & devices:

  • Objective, matter-of-fact third-person narration — flat reportage of a village fête, withholding all judgment.
  • The horror effect is produced by tone–content dissonance and by retrospective foreshadowing (the stones, the box, the nervous humour) that reads innocently on first pass.
  • Economy of detail with allegorical openness — no place, no era, no explanation.
  • Names doing quiet work: Summers the cheery administrator, Graves the postmaster beneath him, Warner the warner, Delacroix — "of the cross" — whose owner picks a stone "so large she had to pick it up with both hands"; little Davy Hutchinson is handed pebbles.
  • The final line as one of the most famous cut-offs in American fiction.

• Context & significance: Jackson (1916–1965), the mid-century mistress of domestic unease (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959; We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962), modelled the village on North Bennington, Vermont. Publication produced the largest mail response The New Yorker had ever had — cancelled subscriptions, demands to know "where these lotteries are held"; the story was reportedly banned in the Union of South Africa. Three years after the camps and at the dawn of Cold War conformity, its scapegoat mechanism read — and reads — as a diagram: ordinary neighbours will stone one of their own if the box tells them to.

• Remember:

  • The New Yorker, 26 June 1948; the story is set on June 27th; ~300 villagers, under two hours.
  • Officials: Mr. Summers (conducts), Mr. Graves (postmaster); the black box, older than Old Man Warner (his 77th lottery).
  • Victim: Tessie Hutchinson; husband Bill draws first for the household.
  • Record mail response in New Yorker history; readers cancelled subscriptions.
  • Sample-MC key: the lottery = a ritual sacrifice.

• Quotable:

  • "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." (Old Man Warner)
  • "'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her." (final line)

Exam angles

• What it is: Premiered 3 December 1947 (Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York; dir. Elia Kazan; Marlon Brando as Stanley, Jessica Tandy as Blanche); Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1948; film 1951 (Vivien Leigh's Oscar). Blanche DuBois, a former English teacher from Laurel, Mississippi, arrives in the French Quarter of New Orleans — having ridden "a street-car named Desire", transferred "to one called Cemeteries", and alighted at Elysian Fields — to stay with her pregnant sister Stella and Stella's husband Stanley Kowalski. The family plantation, Belle Reve, is lost; so, gradually, is Blanche's cover story: a marriage that ended when her young husband Allan Grey shot himself after she discovered his homosexuality and told him he disgusted her; the Hotel Flamingo; dismissal over a seventeen-year-old student. Stanley — poker-playing, bowling, radio-hurling, wife-striking — investigates and demolishes her courtship with his friend Mitch, gifts her a bus ticket back to Laurel at her birthday dinner, and, on the night Stella is in hospital giving birth, rapes her ("We've had this date with each other from the beginning!"). Stella chooses not to believe it; in the final scene, during another poker game, Blanche is led away to a state institution on a doctor's arm: "Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

• Themes & motifs:

  • Desire and death as terminal stations — the allegorical streetcar route Desire → Cemeteries → Elysian Fields.
  • Illusion vs. brute reality: Blanche's "magic" and what ought to be truth vs. Stanley's naked bulbs.
  • The fading Southern belle (question 7) and the death of the plantation South — Belle Reve ("beautiful dream"), lost to generations of "epic fornications".
  • Class and ethnicity in the new urban America — the Kowalskis' polyglot, working-class New Orleans vs. Blanche's genteel pretensions.
  • Sexuality as life-force and weapon; madness as refuge; the complicity of the ordinary (Stella, Mitch, the poker circle).

• Form & devices:

  • Eleven consecutive scenes, no act division — a long fuse rather than classical acts.
  • Williams's "plastic theatre": expressionist stage resources render Blanche's inner state — the Varsouviana polka (heard only by her, always ending in the remembered gunshot), the "blue piano" of the Quarter, the Mexican woman crying "Flores para los muertos", jungle voices and shadows as the rape approaches.
  • Central stage-prop symbols (question 6): the paper lantern over the naked bulb (illusion shading harsh light; Mitch tears it off, Stanley hands it to her as she leaves), Blanche's endless hot baths (purification), the trunk of costumes, white dress and moth-likeness (fragility drawn to flame).
  • Names as irony: Blanche DuBois — "white woods"; Belle Reve; Elysian Fields — resting place of the dead.
  • Poetic Southern rhetoric colliding with Stanley's demotic prose.

• Context & significance: Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams, 1911–1983), with O'Neill and Miller one of the three canonical American dramatists (American drama developed against a history of Puritan hostility to the stage, then post-Revolutionary suspicion of British theatre). In a typology of delusional characters, Streetcar presents Blanche as delusional victim under the belle's double pressure — fading youth/beauty that makes her fish for compliments, and a squandered inheritance that leaves her destitute — driving her into lies that Stanley's "domineering nature" punishes in the "ugly climax" of rape. Kazan's production made Brando's Stanley era-defining; the play (with The Glass Menagerie, 1944/45, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1955) fixed Williams's territory: the collision of Southern romanticism with American appetite.

• Remember:

  • Premiere 3 Dec 1947, dir. Elia Kazan; Pulitzer 1948; film 1951 (Leigh, Brando).
  • Stanley was NOT born in Poland: in Scene 8 he erupts that people from Poland are Poles, not Polacks, "But what I am is one hundred percent American… born and raised in the greatest country on earth" — he is US-born and insists on it.
  • Known sample-test MC: "Stanley Kowalski… a) hates bowling b) was born in Poland c) plays cards a lot" → key: c) plays cards a lot (the recurring poker nights; he also likes bowling, so (a) is false too).
  • Route allegory: streetcar Desire → Cemeteries → Elysian Fields.
  • Belle Reve = the lost plantation (Laurel, Mississippi); Allan Grey = the young husband who shot himself.
  • Eleven scenes; poker frames the play (Scene 3 "The Poker Night", and the final scene).
  • The Varsouviana polka + gunshot = Blanche's guilt heard by the audience.

• Quotable:

  • "Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." (Blanche, Scene 11)
  • "What I am is one hundred percent American" (Stanley, Scene 8 — his self-definition; quote with care or paraphrase)

Exam angles

• What it is: The New Yorker, March 1959; collected in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959; National Book Award 1960). May 1945: Sergeant Nathan Marx, a decorated Jewish combat veteran rotated home from Germany, becomes first sergeant of a trainee company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Trainee Sheldon Grossbart — with sidekicks Fishbein and Halpern — immediately works their shared Jewishness: passes for Friday-night services, an engineered letter-campaign (written by Sheldon over his father's signature) about kosher food, a Passover pass to a St. Louis "aunt" that turns out to be dinner and an egg roll — each favour framed as solidarity, each refusal framed as self-hatred. Marx, moved and manipulated by turns, draws lines late. When orders ship the whole company to the Pacific, Grossbart alone has wangled a reassignment to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey through a connection; Marx, enraged at the final exploitation, phones a contact and has the orders changed back — Grossbart will go to the Pacific with everyone else. Accused by the weeping Grossbart of anti-Semitism, Marx says what he did was done "for all of us", and ends resisting the "impulse to turn and seek pardon" — accepting, like the trainees, his own fate.

• Themes & motifs:

  • The melting pot vs. the salad bowl (question 11): assimilation into a common American identity vs. retention — and leverage — of ethnic distinctness.
  • Group loyalty against universal fairness: what do coreligionists owe each other inside an institution built on equal treatment?
  • Manipulation of identity — Grossbart wields Jewishness as a tool ("defender of the faith" is his pose), forcing Marx to police it.
  • Conscience and vindictiveness — Marx's final act is justice and revenge, and the story lets it be both.
  • The army as America in miniature; the war's moral residue (Marx has "changed" in Europe and is re-learning civilian feeling).

• Form & devices:

  • Retrospective first-person narration by Marx — a scrupulous, self-doubting voice whose judgments the reader must audit (is he fair? seduced? cruel?).
  • Realist scene-building with courtroom-like accumulation of Grossbart's exploits.
  • The title's layered irony: "Defender of the Faith" is a papal/royal honorific (England's Fidei Defensor), here attaching to a sergeant whose defence of "the faith" consists of refusing to let it be merchandised — and equally, mock-attaching to Grossbart's self-image.
  • The closing symmetry ("their fate… my own") converting an army anecdote into a moral verdict.

• Context & significance: Roth (1933, Newark – 2018) debuted with Goodbye, Columbus at 26; this story ignited the first of his career's scandals — rabbis and community organisations accused him of supplying ammunition to anti-Semites, an attack he answered in the essay "Writing About Jews" (1963); the charge would echo through Portnoy's Complaint (1969) to The Human Stain (2000). Read the story through assimilation in Jewish-American literature, with Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) supplying the era's founding metaphor, and under WWII reflections (question 8's list) — though note the war itself stays offstage.

• Remember:

  • The New Yorker, March 1959; in Goodbye, Columbus (1959); National Book Award 1960 (Roth was 26).
  • Sgt. Nathan Marx (narrator) vs. trainee Sheldon Grossbart; also Fishbein & Halpern, Captain Barrett; Camp Crowder, Missouri, May 1945.
  • Grossbart's ladder: services pass → kosher-food letters (father's signature, his hand) → Passover pass (the egg roll) → Fort Monmouth reassignment.
  • Marx's counterstroke: orders changed back — Grossbart ships to the Pacific with the rest.
  • Melting pot metaphor: Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908).

• Quotable:

  • "And then, resisting with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness, I accepted my own." (final sentence)
  • Marx on undoing the reassignment: it was done "for all of us."

Exam angles

• What it is: Morrison's first novel (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), set in her hometown Lorain, Ohio, in 1940–41. Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, poor, dark-skinned and daily taught her own "ugliness", prays for blue eyes. The novel tracks her destruction: temporary fostering with the MacTeer family (narrator Claudia MacTeer, nine, and her sister Frieda are the story's witnessing children); her parents' histories — Pauline, lamed and starved of beauty, who finds order only as the perfect servant of a white household, and Cholly, abandoned as a baby and sexually humiliated by white hunters as a boy — converge when the drunken Cholly rapes his daughter, leaving her pregnant. The fraud-mystic Soaphead Church "grants" her blue eyes (via a poisoned dog); the baby comes early and dies; Pecola goes mad, conversing with an imaginary friend about her beautiful eyes. Claudia and Frieda plant marigold seeds as magic for the baby that never blooms — "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941."

• Themes & motifs:

  • Internalized racism and the white beauty myth — blue eyes, Shirley Temple, Mary Jane candy as a machine that teaches black girls self-hatred; read it as a feminist protest novel criticising domestic violence and the black adoption of white aesthetic and behavioral norms.
  • The community's complicity — Pecola as the scapegoat on whom everyone off-loads ugliness.
  • Family catastrophe traced to root causes: the Breedloves' "ugliness" as internalised verdict, poverty, Cholly's own violation.
  • "Outdoors" as the terror of total dispossession.
  • Seeing vs. being seen — the eye of the title; Pecola's invisibility to the shopkeeper.
  • Nature's refusal — marigolds, the unyielding earth — as moral index.

• Form & devices:

  • The famous Dick-and-Jane primer prologue — a basal-reader paragraph printed three times, first punctuated, then unpunctuated, then run together without spaces: the white-family norm degrading into claustrophobic nonsense, after which its phrases caption the Breedlove chapters (an example of intertextuality).
  • Double narration — Claudia as child and as remembering adult, alternating with an omniscient voice for Pauline (with first-person inserts), Cholly and Soaphead.
  • Seasonal structure (Autumn–Winter–Spring–Summer) ironically inverted — spring brings the rape, summer the madness.
  • The second, italic prologue gives the ending away ("there were no marigolds…"), so the novel proceeds by how rather than what: "since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how".
  • Rich figurative prose set against brutal matter.

• Context & significance: Morrison (Chloe Ardelia Wofford, 1931–2019), then an editor at Random House, wrote it questioning what a 1940s black girlhood did to self-regard — the germ was a Lorain classmate who wanted blue eyes. It ushers multicultural, postmodern protest fiction into the canon; Morrison went on to Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987; Pulitzer 1988) and the Nobel Prize 1993, the first Black woman laureate. An early rave famously called her "the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche" — the blurb is from New York magazine, not the New York Times (a detail worth having exactly right).

• Remember:

  • 1970; set Lorain, Ohio, 1940–41; seasons structure; Dick-and-Jane primer ×3.
  • Narrator family: MacTeer — Claudia & Frieda (note: the official exam paper itself once misspelled it "McTeer" — recognise the question and answer about the MacTeers).
  • Pecola Breedlove; parents Cholly and Pauline; Soaphead Church (Elihue Micah Whitcomb); Maureen Peal, Geraldine, the three prostitutes upstairs.
  • Props of the beauty myth: Shirley Temple cup, Mary Jane candies, the blue-eyed baby dolls.
  • "The D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche" = New York magazine blurb (NOT the NYT).
  • Nobel 1993 — first African American woman laureate.

• Quotable:

  • "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941." (opening of the italic prologue)
  • "I had only one desire: to dismember it." (Claudia, on the white baby doll)

Exam angles

• What it is: Guterson's first novel (1994; PEN/Faulkner Award 1995; film 1999). San Piedro Island, Puget Sound, December 1954: Japanese American fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto stands trial for murdering fellow fisherman Carl Heine, found drowned in his own net with a head wound after a night of thick fog. The trial — prosecutor Alvin Hooks, aged one-eyed defender Nels Gudmundsson — opens onto flashbacks: the pre-war strawberry-farm friendship and the seven acres Kabuo's family was buying from the Heines when Pearl Harbor came; the island's Japanese community deported to the Manzanar internment camp (where Kabuo and Hatsue, née Imada, marry) while Etta Heine sold the land out from under them; Kabuo's and Carl's war service; and the secret adolescent love of Hatsue and Ishmael Chambers — the local editor's son, who came back from the Pacific without his left arm (lost at Tarawa) and without his idealism, and who now runs his dead father Arthur's San Piedro Review alone. During the trial's great snowstorm Ishmael discovers, in the lighthouse's radio logs, proof that a freighter's wake — not Kabuo — knocked Carl from his mast at 1:47 a.m.; after a night of temptation to suppress it and reclaim Hatsue, he surrenders the notes, the boat is re-examined, and the charge is dismissed. His closing insight: "accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart."

• Passages to focus on:

  • Excerpt 1 — "a crucial discovery": Ishmael in the coast-guard lighthouse finds the radioman's shorthand transcripts: a freighter (the S.S. West Corona) ploughed through the shipping channel at 1:42 a.m., five minutes before Carl's watch stopped. Note the comprehension check's point: he finds it half by accident while researching storm records for the paper — and then pockets it ("Those records would stay in his pocket").
  • Excerpt 2 — "Ishmael's dilemma": his mother's kitchen ("You went numb, Ishmael… And you've stayed numb all these years"), the memory of his father Arthur — Belleau Wood veteran, principled newspaperman honoured by the Japanese community — and Hatsue's wartime break-up letter from Manzanar, signed "Hatsue Imada", which he re-reads before choosing. The pack asks why the long reminiscence about his dead father at exactly that point — because Arthur's example is what tips Ishmael from blackmail-fantasy (making Hatsue "beholden to him") to integrity.
  • Excerpt 3 — "the internment camp": Manzanar's half-finished tar-paper barracks and dust; Hatsue's mother Fujiko intercepts Ishmael's letter (false return address via Kenny Yamashita) and Hatsue writes the good-bye letter; giri — the grandmother's word Fujiko translates as doing what one must "quietly, with an entirely stoic demeanor"; Kabuo courts Hatsue by building the Imadas' furniture in the camp.
  • Excerpts 4–5 — "introducing Kabuo": the Miyamoto samurai lineage and kendo training ("zenshin!" — constant awareness of danger), his enlistment as a matter of honour, Hatsue's answer to his proposal ("It's my character… It's my destiny now to love you"), his guilt over the Germans he killed and his Buddhist sense of deserved suffering; then Sergeant Victor Maples's courtroom testimony that Kabuo (attached to the 442nd Nisei regiment) was "eminently capable" of killing with a gaff — kendo helped him survive the war and now helps convict him.
  • Excerpt 6 — "Hyphenated Americans": the true night encounter at sea: Kabuo rescues Carl (dead battery), Carl confesses his own prejudice ("I'm a big Hun Nazi son of a bitch" — and he kept Kabuo's bamboo fishing rod all these years), Kabuo answers "I'm an American… Just like you or anybody", and they shake hands on the seven acres at $1,200 an acre, $800 down. Comprehension check: the Heines remain free while the island’s Japanese American community is forcibly removed. Historically, individual Germans and German Americans were also detained or interned; the crucial distinction is that people of Japanese ancestry faced broad West Coast exclusion and incarceration on an ancestry basis. The novel’s local contrast should not become a false claim that no German Americans were interned. See the National Park Service’s distinction.

• Themes & motifs:

  • Prejudice as the real defendant — the trial repeats in miniature what internment did wholesale.
  • War's long damage: Ishmael's arm and cynicism, Kabuo's "blood on my soul", Carl's hardened silence — the excerpt pack's "common denominator" of all three men.
  • Love across a racial boundary and its costs — the hollow cedar tree; Hatsue's giri-shaped renunciation.
  • Fathers and inheritance: Arthur's newspaper ethics; the Miyamoto sword.
  • Chance vs. will — the snowstorm and the freighter's wake against the one thing not ruled by accident, the human heart.
  • Land as identity: seven acres of strawberry ground.

• Form & devices:

  • Courtroom-drama frame (three December days of trial) opened by long flashbacks — testimony as trapdoor into memory.
  • Omniscient narration circling among Ishmael, Hatsue, Kabuo and the islanders.
  • Dense atmospheric realism — fog, cedars, the storm as moral weather.
  • Withheld-information plotting that makes the reader re-try the case.
  • Symbolism: snow (blind, indifferent accident covering everything), cedars (shelter and secrecy — the lovers' hollow tree), the lighthouse (the record that sees what men don't).
  • The mixed genre deliberately engineered — see question 14.

• Context & significance: Guterson (b. 1956, Seattle) wrote the novel over about ten years of early mornings while teaching English at Bainbridge Island High School — where he taught To Kill a Mockingbird (question 15); Bainbridge Island's real interned Japanese community underlies San Piedro. Published 1994, PEN/Faulkner 1995, a phenomenon of the decade's book clubs; the 1999 film (dir. Scott Hicks, Ethan Hawke as Ishmael) kept the courtroom-memory structure. The novel mainstreamed the internment — Executive Order 9066, Manzanar — for a mass readership within a page-turner's architecture.

• Remember:

  • 1994; PEN/Faulkner 1995; San Piedro Island, Puget Sound, December 1954.
  • Kabuo Miyamoto tried for Carl Heine's death; Hatsue, maiden name Imada; Ishmael Chambers lost his left arm at Tarawa.
  • Manzanar internment (E.O. 9066); the seven acres of strawberry land; Etta Heine's betrayal.
  • The exculpatory fact: the freighter's wake at 1:47 a.m. (Carl's stopped watch), recorded in the lighthouse logs.
  • Guterson: ten years teaching at Bainbridge Island High School, wrote mornings; taught To Kill a Mockingbird.

• Quotable:

  • "I'm an American… Just like you or anybody." (Kabuo to Carl)
  • "…accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart." (the novel's closing insight)

Exam angles

• What it is: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998; Pulitzer Prize 1999 (and PEN/Faulkner 1999); film 2002 (dir. Stephen Daldry; Nicole Kidman's Oscar as Woolf). After a prologue rendering Virginia Woolf's 1941 suicide in the River Ouse, the novel braids one day each of three women across the century, in rotating chapters: "Mrs. Woolf" — Virginia in Richmond, 1923, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway, managing headaches, voices and servants, receiving Vanessa, burying a dead thrush, fleeing toward London, deciding her heroine will not die — "the poet" will; "Mrs. Brown" — Laura Brown, Los Angeles, 1949, pregnant, reading Mrs. Dalloway in bed on her husband Dan's birthday, baking the cake with little Richie, kissing her neighbour Kitty in the kitchen, checking into a hotel where she contemplates death and chooses against it — "She will do all that's required, and more"; "Mrs. Dalloway" — Clarissa Vaughan, New York City, late 1990s, nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by the poet Richard, her first love, now dying of AIDS, for whom she is giving a party on the day he receives the Carrouthers Prize; Richard, quoting Woolf's suicide note, lets himself fall from his window before the party. The strands fuse at the end: the old woman who arrives that evening is Laura Brown — Richard's mother, who after her second child abandoned the family (Toronto, a library job), the "monster" of his poems — and Clarissa serves the party food to her.

• Passages to focus on:

  • Extract 1 — the cake-baking scene: Laura and three-year-old Richie measuring flour; the cake imagined as art, "comfort and safety"; Richie's terrified adoration — study it for the mother–son bond that will become Richard's wound.
  • Extract 2 — the prologue: Virginia's walk to the river, the stone into the coat pocket, the fisherman, Leonard finding the note ("She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.").
  • Extract 3 — the opening "Mrs. Brown" chapter: Laura reading the first line of Mrs. Dalloway — "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself" — while "trying to lose herself… trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world"; Dan resurrected from a false Anzio death report; "So now she is Laura Brown" — the reader-in-the-text.
  • The context sheet frames it all with the status of women: Zinn on the 18th–19th centuries, Barbara Welter's "cult of true womanhood" (piety, sexual purity, submissiveness and domesticity), and above all Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique on the 1950s suburban wife's silent question "Is this all?". The seminar's central task: is Laura's dilemma related to these concerns? (Answer: it is their fictional case study — see below.)
  • Seminar questions to have ready: what do "hours" mean to Richard, to Laura, to Clarissa; the fine line between sanity and insanity (Richard vs. Virginia vs. Laura vs. Woolf's Septimus — is madness tied to creative gifts?); how Richard's childhood wounded him; and why Virginia and Laura, prisoners of their eras, contrast with Clarissa, who has every liberty yet lives as "a fairly conventional wife and mother" — what does that say about society's restrictions?

• Themes & motifs:

  • The ordinary day as the container of a whole life — one day × three women.
  • Time as "the hours" that must each be got through — Richard's dread of the hours after the party, "and the hours after that".
  • Sanity/insanity and creativity: Virginia’s voices, Richard’s visions and Laura’s alienation, as represented in the fiction; distinguish those descriptions from an independent clinical diagnosis.
  • The suburban feminine mystique — Laura as Friedan's housewife, who chooses escape over self-erasure and is judged monstrous for it.
  • Queer desire across all three strands: Virginia and Vanessa's kiss, Laura and Kitty's, Clarissa and Sally's settled partnership.
  • Suicide and the choice to live — Woolf dies, Laura doesn't, Richard does.
  • Reading and writing as survival technologies — author, reader and character distributed across the three women. Context precision. Welter’s historical account identifies four ideals: piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. The local context sheet omits one; use the full list when describing that framework. It concerns a historically specific ideal, not every woman’s lived experience. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860” (1966), p152.

• Form & devices (the grounds of question 13):

  • Intertextuality: the novel rewrites Mrs. Dalloway — Clarissa Vaughan = Clarissa Dalloway with flowers, party and city walk; Richard = Septimus, the mad visionary whose window-death interrupts the party; Louis ≈ Peter Walsh; Woolf's sentences quoted in italics. The very title is Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway ("The Hours"), and Laura's chapters are named after Woolf's essay figure "Mrs. Brown" (from "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown").
  • Metafiction: the author (Virginia writing the novel), a reader (Laura reading it) and a character (Clarissa living it) share one book, so the fiction openly contemplates its own making and consumption.
  • Pastiche: Cunningham imitates Woolf's lyrical free indirect style and one-day structure.
  • Blurred fact/fiction: a documented historical figure moves among invented ones, framed by her real suicide.
  • Rotating tripartite structure with a prologue; recurring objects (flowers, cakes, kisses, water) stitch the strands.

• Context & significance: Cunningham (b. 1952) wrote the novel as an open homage — Woolf for the 1990s, with AIDS in the Septimus position and the plague-era party still insisting on celebration. Pulitzer + PEN/Faulkner 1999; the 2002 film (screenplay David Hare, score Philip Glass) re-canonised both novels — the sample MC asks which text The Hours is intertextual with: Mrs. Dalloway. For a postmodern reading, focus on metafiction and intertextuality.

• Remember:

  • 1998; Pulitzer 1999 (also PEN/Faulkner 1999); film 2002 (Kidman's Oscar).
  • Three strands: Virginia Woolf, Richmond 1923 (writing Mrs. Dalloway) — Laura Brown, Los Angeles 1949 (reading it) — Clarissa Vaughan, NYC late 1990s (living it); prologue = Woolf's suicide, 1941, River Ouse.
  • Title = Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway; "Mrs. Brown" ← Woolf's essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown".
  • Richard = Laura's son Richie: poet, AIDS, Carrouthers Prize, window-fall (the Septimus role); Clarissa's partner Sally, daughter Julia.
  • Compare Laura's dilemma ↔ Friedan, The Feminine Mystique ("Is this all?"); Welter's cult of true womanhood.

• Quotable:

  • "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." (Woolf's opening line, read by Laura in the novel)
  • "She is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world." (Laura reading)

Exam angles

End of guide. Sixteen entries; use the comparisons above for further practice.