Thinking Writing for Oscar Wao II

Everyone must respond to the first question. Please add to your TWOW 1. I always appreciate your responses to my comments and any additional responses you may want to add.

I. Read pages 189 (“What he did was this: . . . .) through page 191 (“. . . . New Brunswick train bridge.”) and describe in your own words and in your own way what happens. II. The Mongoose and the Faceless Man Here are all the references in the text to the ‘faceless man’: 135, 140, 161, 237, 298, 299, 304, 304, 321, 322, 325, 330. What is your understanding of this ‘faceless man’? Use specific references to the text. Here are all the references to the mongoose: 149, 157, 190, 206, 225, 258, 268, 298, 301, 320. What is your understanding of this magical being? Use specific references to the text. If you have read through page 320, you may want to think and write about this particular description of the faceless man and the mongoose:

Oscar imagined he saw his whole family getting on a guagua, even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dead abuela, and who is driving the bus but the Mongoose, and who is the cobrador but the Man Without a Face, but it was nothing but a final fantasy, gone as soon as he blinked, and when the car stopped,

III. Pages 276-278 contain a long Melvellean sentence (remember the one about the whiteness of the whale: Though ...... , yet ...... ). Discuss the design and effect of this very long sentence. If you previously enjoyed writing your own long sentence, you may want to write such a sentence again. IV. You are again invited to write a short, short story in which you use elements of magical realism. Here is another one of mine: That Bird Again So, I thought I was alone on that beach when a sudden gust of wind blew my old tattered hat away. It was like the hat had wings or was some sort of kite, diving and lifting over the sea, but having no string attached, it disappeared over the water and surely landed wherever it is that kites go once they are set free. But then there was this bird call. I turned around and there, where there had been not one solitary person for months, was a girl wearing my hat. She laughed at my surprise, handed me my hat, and flew happily off. I knew then I was not alone. V. I will be putting together another collection of English Ii writing. I invite you to submit up to two pages of your own choice and design. I must receive those pages no later than next Wednesday evening. V. Lines form Derek Walcott that may inspire you to write about your own first friend: My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. I stop talking now. I work, then I read, cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars. Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam as the deck turn white and the moon open a cloud like a door, and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home.