Description
Instruction for close reading Assignment:
1. Use the giving passage below to answer these questions:
2. Summarize what has happened in the story right before the passage appears. ( will lose points for simply submitting a long summary and very little analysis.)
3. Describe the contents of the passage in approximately 5 sentences (Who? What? When? Where? Why?)
4. Explain how the passage is connected to the entire work. How does it relate to the themes, ideas, characters, and/or action in the story? What insight does the passage provide to the entire story? Examine each sentence of the passage. What do you notice? What information is revealed?
5. Discuss your observations and ideas about the passage. Explore your ideas and explain why you have them. Remember to also focus on the following:
• Patterns
• Vocabulary (denotation and connotation)
• Language (word choice, phrasing, sentence structure, etc.)
• Characterization
• Narration
• Figures of Speech
• Symbolism
• Imagery (How do the images function in the passage you’ve chosen. Are these
images repeated throughout the text? Does the passage lack imagery?)
• Tone and/or Mood
Hurston, “Sweat”: She lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail. Not an image left standing along the way. Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream that had been pressed from her heart. Her tears, her sweat, her blood. She had brought love to the union and he had brought a longing after the flesh. Two months after the wedding, he had given her the first brutal beating. She had the memory of his numerous trips to Orlando with all of his wages when he had returned to her penniless, even before the first year had passed. She was young and soft then, but now she thought of her knotty, muscled limbs, her harsh knuckly hands, and drew herself up into an unhappy little ball in the middle of the big feather bed. Too late now to hope for love, even if it were not Bertha it would be someone else.
This case differed from the others only in that she was bolder than the others. Too late for everything except her little home. She had built it for her old days, and planted one by one the trees and flowers there. It was lovely to her, lovely.
Somehow, before sleep came, she found herself saying aloud: “Oh well, whatever goes over the Devil’s back, is got to come under his belly. Sometime or ruther, Sykes, like everybody else, is gointer reap his sowing. (1023-4)
