DOCSLIB.ORG

Creating Character in Ernest Hemingway's

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Creating Character in Ernest Hemingway's Kahini Magazine el The Problem of Pain: Creating Character in Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” Jordan Hartt Ernest Hemingway’s slim, 1,140-word short story “Cat in the Rain”—based on a true-life event and inspired by it-actually-happened dialogue—helps us think about one of the central questions of our writing: how to create character. Do we pull characters from real life, or invent them out of whole cloth. Do we lead our characters through the story, or do we allow them to lead us. What kind of a dance is it, this creating (or discovering) of character? Solutions and styles range all over the literary map. If you ask a thousand different writers, you will get a thousand different answers. For example, Vladimir Nabokov said: “my characters are galley slaves”—meaning, they did what he wanted them to do. “I take control of them,” says Toni Morrison, a sentiment also echoed by such writers as John Cheever, and Fay Weldon, among many others. Mario Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, says that “you can’t mold characters” (italics mine.) And Andre Dubus famously believed that only by letting go of all control of your characters would they emerge. Erskine Caldwell described his process like this: “I have no influence over them. I’m only an observer, recording. The story is always being told by the characters themselves. In fact, I’m often critical, or maybe ashamed, of what some of them say and do—their profanity or their immorality. But I have no control over it.” Bernard Malamud found a place in the middle, “My characters run away, but not far.” Or, as expanded upon by Robert Stone, “You construct characters and set them going in their own interior landscape, and what they find to talk about and what confronts them are, of course, the things that concern you most.” So the process of creating character—whether we control them through the story from start to finish, or simply observe them and record their behavior (or are these even the same thing, since we are, in the end, the ones who decide what to record and what not to?)— depends upon ourselves as individual writers, and finding what process works best for us, personally. For instance, some writers write long backstories of their characters in journals or notebooks, so that they know every aspect of the character they are writing. Others only know whatever they write on the page: that a character picked up a chipped cup, and drank the hot tea so quickly she burned her tongue, for instance. Kahini Magazine el Similarly, when it comes to finding character in the first place: do we draw on elements of real people we know, create entirely new characters, or some mixture of both? From Graham Greene: “One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.” From Maya Angelou: “Sometimes I make a character from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in any one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about.” Or Ernest Hemingway, responding to a Paris Review question about whether characters are taking from real life: “Of course they are not. Some come from real life. Mostly you invent people from a knowledge and understanding and experience of people.” What is the inspiration of our characters? How do we go from inspiration to characters that are real on the page? We know that characters can be created from one person (Hester Prynne was based on a real-world counterpart, for example) or from three or four or a dozen people, or invented completely. We also know that characters can be created by controlling them through the story, as in the work of Toni Morrison. We know that characters can be created by allowing them to control the story themselves, with us following behind. Whatever our process, how do we know when the character has fully come to life, in our story? Through character action, character dialogue, and character description. Hemingway’s story “Cat in the Rain” was inspired by a real-life incident with his real-life wife, Hadley. They lived in Paris, at the time, and Hadley wanted a cat, but Ernest felt they were too poor. During a visit to Italy in 1923, Hadley spotted a stray kitten hiding under a table in the rain, and said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun I can have a cat.” The resulting story, “Cat in the Rain” was one of the stories of the collection “In Our Time”—dedicated to Hadley—which came out in Paris in March of 1924. Character emerges—what a wonderful word that Graham Greene used—in this story through the slow accumulation of detail, and what is not included: the details omitted through Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission. (“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them,” he wrote, in “Death in the Afternoon.” The dignity of movement of an ice- berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”) Kahini Magazine el The story opens: “There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel.” This external authorial voice locates us, in nine words, with the transitory nature of the two main characters, and that they are in a culture not their own. The first line, sentence, or paragraph of a work of art—especially one as short as “Cat in the Rain”—often teaches us how to read what follows. As Gabriel García Márquez noted, “I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be.” While many writers, unlike García Márquez, don’t necessarily start the process with the first paragraph (for many writers, the opening is the last thing that they write), they are obviously the first words that a reader encounters, and therefore carry much of the contextualizing weight of the story: “They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room,” the story continues. “Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out of the empty square.” The opening continues in the vein of the external third-person authorial voice, who declines to enter at this point the consciousness of either of the characters. We are located not only in a specific time and place, but the weather of the rain serves as an additional pressure that will force the two American characters to have to spend time with one another: yet even now, they don’t. The woman looks out of the window, away from the husband; the husband opens a book: “The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on. ‘I’m going down and get that kitty,’ the American wife said. ‘I’ll do it,’ her husband offered from the bed. ‘No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.’ The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed. ‘Don’t get wet,’ he said. As we’ve noted, character is created through three things: easily remembered through the acronym A.D.D: action, description, and dialogue. Kahini Magazine el We see character through action. (What do they do?) We see character through description. (What do they look like? How do they dress or maintain their bodies? This was much more frequently used in nineteenth-century novels: contemporary writers, particularly short story writers, attempt to paint character in as few paint-strokes as possible.) And we see character through dialogue. (What do they say?) Let’s look at this scene again, with this in mind: “The American wife stood at the window looking out.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Hemingway & Faulkner English 423, Fall 2016 Dr. David Swerdlow 405
    Hemingway & Faulkner English 423, Fall 2016 Dr. David Swerdlow 405 Thompson-Clark, x7345 Office Hours: MWF 11-12 and by appt. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner are among the United States’ most celebrated writers. Nobel laureates and icons of the modernist era, these two writers may be most known for their easily recognizable and radically different styles that surface in everything they write. In many ways, however, they are kindred spirits in terms of theme and ambition. Consider their Nobel Prize acceptance speeches. (Please note that Hemingway, because of illness, was not able to give his speech himself. It was delivered by the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden.) Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize. No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience. It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ernest Hemingway Primer
    The Ernest Hemingway Primer By Timeless Hemingway Copyright © 2009 Timeless Hemingway Publications. All rights reserved. Contents I. Biography II. Books by Ernest Hemingway III. The Life: Top 5 Frequently Asked Questions IV. The Literature: Top 5 Frequently Asked Questions V. Notable Quotables VI. Further Reading 2 Biography I. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois to Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway. The second of six children, Ernest enjoyed an adventurous boyhood, fishing and hunting with his father in the northern woods of Michigan. He attended Oak Park High School where he excelled in his classes, particularly English. He tried his hand at football and swimming, edited the school paper (the Trapeze), and contributed pieces to the school's literary magazine (the Tabula). After graduating high school, Ernest traveled to Kansas City and worked as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. In 1918, he began service as an ambulance driver for the Italian army. On July 8, he was wounded at Fossalta on the Italian Piave while delivering chocolates, cigarettes, and postcards to soldiers. He married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson on September 3, 1921. The newlyweds soon entered the literary community of Paris, living off of Hadley's trust fund and Ernest's pay as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. The 1920's were extremely productive writing years for Hemingway. Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in 1923, In Our Time in 1925. In 1926, The Torrents of Spring and the widely successful novel, The Sun Also Rises were published.
    [Show full text]
  • Electronic Green Journal Volume 1, Issue 41, April 2018
    Electronic Green Journal Volume 1, Issue 41, April 2018 Review: Citizen Steinbeck: Giving Voice to the People By Robert McParland Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller New York, NY, USA McParland, Robert. Citizen Steinbeck: Giving Voice to the People. Lanham, MD, USA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 259 pp. ISBN: 9781442268302, hardback. US$40.00; alkaline paper; also available as an e-book. Citizen Steinbeck: Giving Voice to the People provides a wonderful and fascinating overview of the life and literary achievement of John Steinbeck (1902-1968). English Professor Robert McParland tells a detailed story about Steinbeck’s life which begins in Salinas, California, as well as his struggle to be a successful writer, his days at work and in the war, and his literary success and achievements. As a writer, Steinbeck went beyond being a regionalist to become one of America’s most famous writers; he won a Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also had an international perspective having been part of the American military struggles overseas and having done some travel writing and setting some of his stories in other countries. Steinbeck began as a reporter but went on to write some stories with mythological elements as well as having characters that believed in witchcraft and astrology. His novels were set in the land with lush descriptions of the outdoors. Salinas, CA was part of the farming community and Steinbeck wrote of their times and struggles. Steinbeck also wrote about some of the animals in these landscapes and one could argue that he also gave them and the land a voice.
    [Show full text]
  • The Art of Katherine Anne Porter Vernon A
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of New Mexico New Mexico Quarterly Volume 15 | Issue 3 Article 11 1945 The Art of Katherine Anne Porter Vernon A. Young Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq Recommended Citation Young, Vernon A.. "The Art of Katherine Anne Porter." New Mexico Quarterly 15, 3 (1945). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/ vol15/iss3/11 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by the University of New Mexico Press at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Quarterly by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. - Young: The Art of Katherine Anne Porter THE ART 0 F') KAT HER IN E ANN E PORTER Vernon A. ,Young ~ . ITH FOUR SHORT NOVELS and barely a score of short stones, W Katherine Anne PQrter has establi~hed herself for posterity as the most flawless realist of her generation, yet not until last year, when The Leaning Tower and Other Stories. was published, had she received anything like her due, except from the extreme critical minor­ ity. In 1931 she received a Guggenheim fellowship for Flowering Juda..t;;, and in 1937, for Flowering Judas and Other Stories, a $2,500 fel­ lowship given by the Book-of-the-Month Club "to an American author whose work has not received from the book-reading public the recog- nition it deserved, as measured by actual sales." - One is no longer surprised that literature of moral subtlety and stylistic rectitude may not sell.
    [Show full text]
  • Ernest Hemingway Global American Modernist
    Ernest Hemingway Global American Modernist Lisa Tyler Sinclair Community College, USA Iconic American modernist Ernest Hemingway spent his entire adult life in an interna- tional (although primarily English-speaking) modernist milieu interested in breaking with the traditions of the past and creating new art forms. Throughout his lifetime he traveled extensively, especially in France, Spain, Italy, Cuba, and what was then British East Africa (now Kenya and Tanzania), and wrote about all of these places: “For we have been there in the books and out of the books – and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been” (Hemingway 1935, 109). At the time of his death, he was a global celebrity recognized around the world. His writings were widely translated during his lifetime and are still taught in secondary schools and universities all over the globe. Ernest Hemingway was born 21 July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, also the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most famous modernist architects in the world. Hemingway could look across the street from his childhood home and see one of Wright’s innovative designs (Hays 2014, 54). As he was growing up, Hemingway and his family often traveled to nearby Chicago to visit the Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Opera House. Because of the 1871 fire that destroyed structures over more than three square miles of the city, a substantial part of Chicago had become a clean slate on which late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century architects could design what a modern city should look like.
    [Show full text]
  • Untitled [Richard Arlin Stull on the Game]
    Jack London. The Game. Introduction to Bison Books Edition by Michael Oriard. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 132 pp. $12.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-8032-7999-5. Reviewed by Richard Arlin Stull Published on H-Arete (September, 2001) The Game is a must for any Jack London afi‐ veals how London was a man of his time who ro‐ cionado or anyone not familiar with the quintes‐ manticized both the working class and the Niet‐ sential California adventurer and turn-of-the-cen‐ zschean super-hero. His citations of London's tury American literary superstar. Penned when newspaper articles and personal correspondence London was at the peak of his publishing powers, give cultural context to this story/allegory, which The Game is about a subject London knew well-- London himself called one of his personal fa‐ boxing. London, who had many a scrape in his vorites. American Ashcan painter George Bellow's time, was a boxing sportswriter for the San Fran‐ famous painting "Club Night" from the National cisco Examiner, sparred with the "Bohemian set" Gallery graces the cover of this edition. Bellow's in Northern California, and saw allegorical alche‐ fighters in primal struggle along with the distort‐ my in the "manly art." ed faces and the blood lust of the crowd is a per‐ Protagonist Jack Fleming is drawn between fect pick for London's The Game. This book is a his love of the game and his fancée, Genevieve. classic piece in boxing fction, representative of Though uncomprehending of Jack's love of box‐ many recurring themes in London's works, and ing, Genevieve attends his fght with the savage some would argue, a timeless take on human na‐ John Ponta.
    [Show full text]
  • STEINBECK with HIS NOVEL the GRAPES of WRATH: a CRITICAL OUTLOOK Dr
    VEDA’S JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (JOELL) Vol.5 Issue 4 An International Peer Reviewed Journal 2018 http://www.joell.in RESEARCH ARTICLE STEINBECK WITH HIS NOVEL THE GRAPES OF WRATH: A CRITICAL OUTLOOK Dr. Ch. Anuradha (Senior Lecturer in English, K.B. N. College, Vijayawada.) ABSTRACT Every age has its representative writer, whose career follows its major interests, whose voice is its voice. In him we can see the moods, if not the actual events of his time, most clearly reflected and its strongest drives most forcefully crystallized. The two basic impulses of the 1930s towards escape and toward social consciousness found their sharpest expression in the writing of John Steinbeck, whose work represents more faithfully than any of his contemporaries the temperament of an angry decade. The greatest literary event of the year 1939 was the publication of his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath. The present article is a critical analysis of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Keywords: Inhumanity, Labouring Class, Communism, Agricultural Depression. Author(s) retain the copyright of this article Copyright © 2018 VEDA Publications Author(s) agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License . John Steinbeck is one of the few American had appeared with a sure and subtle sense for writers who can be discussed in relation to the past literary effect, a story-teller worthy to be compared as well as the present. He might have been the last to Chekov or Anatole France for his skill in shaping up writer of a generation for whom being an American the stuff of human lives in forms that delight the seemed in itself a special thing and being an mind and imagination”, (1957: 80) and that was John American an extraordinary thing.
    [Show full text]
  • The Literary Heroes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway ; Updike and Bellow Martha Ristine Skyrms Iowa State University
    Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1979 The literary heroes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway ; Updike and Bellow Martha Ristine Skyrms Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Skyrms, Martha Ristine, "The literary heroes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway ; Updike and Bellow " (1979). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 6966. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/6966 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The literary heroes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway; Updike and Bellow by Martha Ristine Skyrms A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English Approved: Signatures have been redacted for privacy Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 1979 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1 The Decades 1 FITZGERALD g The Fitzgerald Hero 9 g The Fitzgerald Hero: Summary 27 ^ HEMINGWAY 29 . The Hemingway Hero 31 ^ The Hemingway Hero; Summary 43 THE HERO OF THE TWENTIES 45 UPDIKE 47 The Updike Hero 43 The Updike Hero: Summary 67 BELLOW 70 The Bellow Hero 71 The Bellow Hero: Summary 9I THE HERO OF THE SIXTIES 93 ir CONCLUSION 95 notes , 99 Introduction 99 Fitzgerald 99 Hemingway j_Oi The Hero of the Twenties loi Updike 1Q2 Bellow BIBLIOGRAPHY 104 INTRODUCTION 9 This thesis will undertake an examination of the literary heroes of the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-sixties, emphasizing the qualities which those heroes share and those qualities which distinguish them.
    [Show full text]
  • James Gould Cozzens: a Documentary Volume
    Dictionary of Literary Biography • Volume Two Hundred Ninety-Four James Gould Cozzens: A Documentary Volume Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book GALE" THOMSON GALE Detroit • New York • San Diego • San Francisco • Cleveland • New Haven, Conn. • Waterville, Maine • London • Munich Contents Plan of the Series xxvii Introduction xxix Acknowledgments xxxiii Permissions xxxiv Books by James Gould Cozzens 3 Chronology 5 I. Youth and Confusion 9 Early Years 9 Brought Up in a Garden—from James Gould Cozzens's foreword to Roses of Yesterday (1967) Facsimile: Illustrated composition Facsimile: Staten Island Academy composition Two Poems-'The Andes," The Qwjfljanuary 1915, and "Lord Kitchener," Digby Weekly Courier, 16June1916 Kent School \ 15 A Democratic School-article by Cozzens, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1920 Emerson: "A Friendly Thinker"—essay by Cozzens, Kent Quarterly, December 1920 Books That Mattered—list of books Cozzens submitted to Christian Century, 22 August 1962 Harvard 19 The Trust in Princes-poem by Cozzens, Harvard Advocate, 1 November 1922 Remember the Rose—story by Cozzens, Harvard Advocate, 1 June 1923 A First Novel 22 Facsimile: Epigraph for Confusion Some Putative Facts of Hard Record or He Commences Authour Aetatis Suae 19-20-Cozzens letter to Matthew J. Bruccoli The Birth of Cerise: from Confusion Facsimile: Pages from Cozzens's 1923 diary: 24 February, 13 March, and 17 October The Death of Cerise: from Confusion Reception of Confusion 31 Harvard Undergrad, at 19, Has 'Best Seller' Accepted-Boston Traveller, 1 April 1924 ; Beebe Celebrates Cozzens-from The Lucius Beebe Reader and Beebe's review of Cozzens's novel in the Boston Telegram, 8 April 1924 A Voice From Young Harvard-C.
    [Show full text]
  • 10 CRITICS DISCUSS “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933) Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) “I Guess the Story That Tops Them A
    10 CRITICS DISCUSS “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933) Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) “I guess the story that tops them all for leave-out was ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ I left everything out of that one…. May be my favorite story.” Ernest Hemingway “’A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ is not only one of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest stories, it is also one of the shortest stories in the language…it is a model of the short story, with all the virtues that attend it as a genre singularly lighted… The quality of this story exists in the fact that it says so much in so little space…it combines maximum economy with maximum implication…. The miracle, in Hemingway, is that nothing, nada y pues nada, totally experienced, and explored with such tense unwillingness to talk about it, is made to mean as much as nothingness can mean. He makes, somehow, from nothingness, a moving splendor…. There are few physical details—the tree, the shutters, the light and cleanliness, the shining steam pressure coffee machine—and these are presented in baldest possible words. The few details that appear more than once appear each time exactly as they were before, which is to say that their paucity is increased in the repetition. The poverty becomes richer in poverty. As the diction is of the sparsest, so the rhythms of the sentences are either short and blunt, truncated like the characters’ experience, or loose, running on to no organized syntactical end. When these sentences are long, they are long because of coordinating conjunctions, ands and buts, which suggest that the several elements in the sentence have equal importance or unimportance, exactly as the story tells us that everything has equal value, therefore no value….
    [Show full text]
  • Ernest Hemingway, the False Macho
    Essay Men and Masculinities 15(4) 424-431 ª The Author(s) 2012 Ernest Hemingway, the Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12455786 False Macho http://jmm.sagepub.com John Hemingway1 Certainly, when people think of Ernest Hemingway what comes to mind for most is the idea that he was a ‘‘man’s man,’’ a true macho who loved in equal parts drinking, hunting, war, and womanizing. He is associated with Pamplona and the running of the bulls, corrida, deep-sea fishing for marlin in the Caribbean, and the shooting of lions and water buffalo in East Africa. He was a man of action, the Lord Byron of his age, seriously wounded in Italy in the First World War, the survivor of two airplane crashes and, of course, as a writer someone who won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for literature. Yet, while all of the above is true, this traditional image of my grandfather was problematic for me as I was growing up. Being a part of the family I couldn’t, like most of my grandfather’s many admirers, look at the man and just see the legendary writer and world traveler. This was because my father, Ernest’s youngest son Gregory, seemed to be as different as you could be from the author of The Old Man and the Sea. From his early teenage years, Gregory cross-dressed and eventually underwent a series of operations at the age of sixty-four to change his sex. Needless to say, there were many times when I’d ask myself, just what connection could there possibly be between this cross-dressing, transsexual Doctor of Medicine (MD), and America’s macho icon? While there didn’t seem to be any on the surface, even as a boy I knew that there was a strong link between the two men.
    [Show full text]
  • Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the *American Literature
    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 074 501 CS 200 379 AUTHCR Meeks, Elizabeth TITLE Introducing Literature of the Minorities. PUB CATE Nov 72 NOTE 12p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English (62nd, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 23-25, 1972) EDRS PRICE MF-$0.65 HC-$3.29 DESCRIPTORS *American Literature; College Instruction; *Cultural Education; English Instruction; Fiction; Literary Criticism; *Minority Groups; Negro Literature; *Novels; Secondary Education; Social Relations; *Thematic Approach ABSTRACT This paper discusses a thematic approach to introduce high school or college students to fiction that deals with minority groups. The author discusses how this thematic arrangement of novels may be a useful method for organizing a study of minority groups as represented in major works of American fiction. She discusses the initiation motif as a suggested frame of reference for this study, devoting the major portion of her paper to a discussion of how William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" can be used to illustrate this theme as it relates to racial interaction in American society. The author also suggests some other American novels dealing with minority groups that can be taught in thematic units. These include "The Adventures of Augie March" by Saul Bellow, "The Learning Tree" by Gordon Parks, and "Pocho" by Jose Villareal, and other novels which suggest the value fiction can have in presenting complex social problems in subtle and vivid ways. (DI)e FILMED FROM BESTAVAILABLE
    [Show full text]