ELI10 - XX1 - K13 - ELI10 - UNDERSTANDING FICTION: THE NOVEL

Wählen Sie aus den folgenden Aufgaben je eine Textinterpretation und einen Essay zur Beantwortung aus:
Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea (p.80/81)
Use the passage printed below for an interpretation; the following questions may serve you as guidelines for your work:
a) What are the narrative techniques used here by the author?
b) What does the passage contribute to a characterization of Santiago?
c) Is there a connection between this passage and the central theme of the novel?
“ ‘It was the only way to kill him’, the old man said. He was feeling better since the water and he knew he would not go away and his head was clear. He’s over fifteen hundred pounds the way he is, he thought. Maybe much more. If he dresses out two thirds of that at thirty cents a pound?
‘I need a pencil for that’, he said. ‘My head is not that clear. But I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me today. I had no bone spurs. But the hands and the back hurt truly.’ I wonder what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we have them without knowing of it.
He made the fish fast to bow and stern and to the middle thwart. He was so big it was like lashing a much bigger skiff alongside. He cut a piece of line and tied the fish’s lower jaw against his bill so his mouth would not open and they would sail as cleanly as possible. Then he stepped the mast and, with the stick that was his gaff and with his boom rigged, and patched sail drew, the boat began to move, and half lying in the stern he sailed south-west.
He did not need a compass to tell him where south-east was. He only needed the feel of the trade wind and the drawing of the sail. I better put a small line out with a spoon on it and try and get something to eat and drink for the moisture. But he could not find a spoon and his sardines were rotten. So he hooked a patch of yellow Gulf weed with the gaff as they passed and shook it so that the small shrimps that were in it fell onto the planking of the skiff. There were more than a dozen of them and they jumped and kicked like sand flies. The old man pinched their heads off with his thumb and forefinger and ate them chewing up the shells and the tails. They were very tiny but he knew they were nourishing and they tasted good.”
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Essay writing:
Write an essay in which you try to answer the following question: What does Manolin contribute to the understanding of Santiago and of his experience? (Write about 450 words.)
These hints may help you to answer the question:
- Characterize their relationship.
- Describe Manolin’s care for Santiago.
- Characterize the admiration which the boy has for the old man.
- Analyse Manolin’s reaction to Santiago’s statement that he was ‘beaten’. (p.103)
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F. S. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Use the passage (text pages 192 – 194) printed below for an interpretation; the following questions may serve as a guideline for your work:
a) Describe in detail what it is that fascinates Gatsby.
b) Comment on the statements which point at the discrepancy between Gatsby and Daisy and her world which can be found in this passage.
c) Is the passage connected with the central theme of the novel?
“She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him – he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity, was that Daisy lived there – it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was for him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emitions.
But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously – eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretences. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same strata as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her. As a mater of fact, he had no such facilities – he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.”
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Essay writing:
Nick: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” (p.227)
Write an essay in which you explain what Nick means by calling himself and the others “Westerners”; interpret the terms “deficiency” as Nick uses it here; and show the different effect which this “deficiency” has on the lives of Nick and the others. (Write about 500 words.)
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