Gannon/Sokol

Agenda:

Contest entries are due today! Submit to Sokol, print out Gannon entries

All missing work due as well.

Continue reading Sedaris next week and work on your personal narratives

Sedaris narratives cont.

AGENDA:

EQ: What are the nuts and bolts of good essay writing?

Read this blog post:--CONCISION and CLARITY

http://gloriagracechang.blogspot.com/2012/08/me-talk-pretty-one-day_21.html

Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) is a New York Times best-selling collection of humorous, autobiographical essays. Sedaris has mastered the art of self-deprecating humor. His radio debut was on the NPR's Morning Edition in 1992, where he read his hilarious and now-popular essay “SantaLand Diaries," tales of his experiences working as a Santa elf for a large department store. Shortly after his NPR performance, he was awarded a two-book deal with a major publisher and has since written numerous other best-sellers and frequently performs his works on stage. Me Talk Pretty One Day is Sedaris’s third book.
The twenty-eight essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day cover some of Sedaris’s more awkward school experiences growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. For example, in the essay “Go Carolina,” Sedaris relates his first encounter with the school speech therapist, who attempted to cure the author’s lisp. Sedaris found it curious that though there were other students who were equally humiliated by being called out of class for special training to rid themselves of speech impediments, it never seemed to be the popular or cute students.
The stories continue as the author moves through several colleges as he tries to decide what to do with his life. Most of these stories make fun of the author, but Sedaris is not shy of also putting members of his family in the spotlight. In the essay called “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” Sedaris picks on his youngest brother Paul and Paul’s frequent use of curse words. Paul, born at the end of the line of six children, was raised by more relaxed parents. In this particular essay, Sedaris points out that Paul got to do so much more than the older kids were allowed.
When Sedaris moves to Paris with his boyfriend, Hugh, he takes with him his ability to find humor in humiliating situations. In the title essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Sedaris tries to become more proficient in speaking French but is embarrassed by the teacher. In “The City of Lights in the Dark,” Sedaris admits that he spends much of his time in Paris watching dubbed American movies.
This collection proved so popular that movie director Wayne Wang made an offer to adapt the essays to film. Sedaris agreed for a while, and then changed his mind. He was worried about how his family would be portrayed and backed out of the deal.

WRITNG:  Work on your own essays

HMWK: Read Sedaris' essays

Sedaris narratives

AGENDA:
Discuss David Sedaris
Work on Humorous Personal Narratives (Sedaris nonfiction)

Please post a comment about a David Sedaris story that you find funny.  Discuss what elements of writing humorously Sedaris uses in the story.  Post your comment on here for credit!



From litlovers.com

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Me Talk Pretty One Day:


1. What better place to start a discussion of a Sedaris book than with the parts you find the funniest? Which parts make you LOL (laugh out loud)? Go around the room and share your belly laughs with others.
2. Are there sections of the book you feel are snide or mean-spirited? Perhaps his criticism of Americans who visit Europe dressed "as if you've come to mow its lawns." Or perhaps the piece about his stint as a writing teacher. Is petulance a part of Sedaris's schtick...his charm?
3. Talk about the Sedaris family, in particular his parents. How do they come across? Whom does he feel closest to? Sedaris makes an interesting statement about his father: it was a mystery that "a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests." Is that unusual?
4. David Sedaris is a descendant of Woody Allen's brand of humor—personal idiosyncrasies or neuroses raised to an art form. What does Sedaris reveal about himself, his insecurities, angst, secret hostilities, and do you find those parts funny or somewhat touching, even sad? Actually, do you like Sedaris as he reveals himself in his book?
5. Are there parts of Me Talk Pretty that you disliked, didn't find funny, found overworked or contrived?
6. For a book club meeting: it would be fun to get the audio version and listen to selected segments. I especially recommend the French lessons in Paris.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.) 

HMWK:  Read

How to Write Like David Sedaris

David Sedaris videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExcpcPZKWpU&list=PLA86A504AA10A73C9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5apZmwR9UI&list=PLA86A504AA10A73C9 


How to write like David Sedaris:

http://remainingawriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-to-write-like-david.html

http://ydrstorytelling.blogspot.com/2012/04/david-sedaris-on-writing-write-everyday.html

http://thecopybot.com/2011/08/sedaris-first-sentence/ 

http://www.missourireview.com/archives/bbarticle/a-conversation-with-david-sedaris/ 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812072,00.html

Welcome back!

Please read Sedaris to pg. 59

TRY THIS EXERCISE TODAY AND POST YOUR ANSWERS!

http://thewritepractice.com/four-commandments-to-writing-funny/

David Sedaris

Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris, 2000
Little, Brown & Company
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316776967


Summary 
Me Talk Pretty One Day contains far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical essays—it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself. Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it all.
No medium available to mankind is spared his cultural vision; no family member (even the dynasties of family pets) is forgotten in these pages of sardonic memories of Sedaris's numerous incarnations in North Carolina, Chicago, New York, and France.
One essay, punctuated by a conspicuous absence of s's and plurals, introduces the lisping young fifth-grader David "Thedarith," who arms himself with a thesaurus, learns every nonsibilant word in the lexicon, eludes his wily speech therapy teacher, and amazes his countrified North Carolina teachers with his out-of-nowhere and man-size vocabulary.
By an ironic twist of fate, readers find present-day Sedaris in France, where only now, after all these years, he must cling safely to just plural nouns so as to avoid assigning the wrong genders to French objects. (Never mind that ordering items from the grocer becomes rather expensive.) Even the strictest of grammarians won't be able to look at the parts of speech in the same way after exposing themselves to the linguistic phenomena of Sedarisian humor. Just why is a sandwich masculine, and yet, say, a belt is feminine in the French language? As he stealthily tries to decode French, like a cross between a housewife and a shrewddetective, he earns the contempt of his sadistic French teacher and soon even resorts to listening to American books on tape for secret relief.
What David Sedaris has to say about language classes, his brother's gangsta-rap slang, typewriters, computers, audiobooks, movies, and even restaurant menus is sure to unleash upon the world a mad rash of pocket-dictionary-toting nouveau grammarians who bow their heads to a new, inverted word order. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio• Birth—December 26, 1956
• Where—Johnson City, New York, USA
• Education—B.F.A., Art Institute of Chicago
• Awards—Thurber Prize; Time Humorist of the Year;
  Advocate Lambda Award.
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK

According to Time Out New York, "David Sedaris may be the funniest man alive." He's the sort of writer critics tend to describe not in terms of literary influences and trends, but in terms of what they choked on while reading his latest book. "I spewed a mouthful of pastrami across my desk," admitted Craig Seligman in his New York Times review of Naked.
Sedaris first drew national attention in 1992 with a stint on National Public Radio, on which he recounted his experiences as a Christmas elf at Macy's. He discussed "the code names for various posts, such as 'The Vomit Corner,' a mirrored wall near the Magic Tree" and confided that his response to "I'm going to have you fired" was the desire to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed." The radio pieces were such a hit that Sedaris, then working as a house cleaner, started getting offers to write movies, soap operas and Seinfeld episodes.
In subsequent appearances on NPR, Sedaris proved he wasn't just a velvet-clad flash in the pan; he's also wickedly funny on the subjects of smoking, speed, shoplifting and nervous tics. His work began appearing in magazines like Harper's and Mirabella, and his first book Barrel Fever, which included "SantaLand Diaries," was a bestseller. "These hilarious, lively and breathtakingly irreverent stories...made me laugh out loud more than anything I've read in years," wrote Francine Prose in the Washington Post Book World.
Since then, each successive Sedaris volume has zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists. In Naked, he recounts odd jobs like volunteering at a mental hospital, picking apples as a seasonal laborer and stripping woodwork for a Nazi sympathizer. The stocking stuffer-sized Holidays on Ice collects Sedaris' Christmas-themed work, including a fictional holiday newsletter from the homicidal stepmother of a 22-year-old Vietnamese immigrant ("She arrived in this house six weeks ago speaking only the words 'Daddy,' 'Shiny' and 'Five dollar now'. Quite a vocabulary!!!!!").
But Sedaris' best pieces often revolve around his childhood in North Carolina and his family of six siblings, including the brother who talks like a redneck gangsta rapper and the sister who, in a hilarious passage far too dirty to quote here, introduces him to the joys of the Internet. Sedaris' recent book Me Talk Pretty One Day describes, among other things, his efforts to learn French while helping his boyfriend fix up a Normandy farmhouse; he progresses "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window."
Sedaris has been compared to American humorists such as Mark Twain, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker; Publisher's Weekly called him "Garrison Keillor's evil twin." Pretty heady stuff for a man who claims there are cats that weigh more than his IQ score. But as This American Life producer Ira Glass once pointed out, it would be wrong to think of Sedaris as "just a working Joe who happens to put out these perfectly constructed pieces of prose." Measured by his ability to turn his experiences into a sharply satirical, sidesplittingly funny form of art, David Sedaris is no less than a genius.
Extras
• Sedaris got his start in radio after This American Life producer Ira Glass saw him perform at Club Lower Links in Chicago. In addition to his NPR commentaries, Sedaris now writes regularly for Esquire.
• Sedaris's younger sister Amy is also a writer and performer; the two have collaborated on plays under the moniker "The Talent Family." Amy Sedaris has appeared onstage as a member of the Second City improv troupe and on Comedy Central in the series Strangers with Candy.
• If I weren't a writer, I'd be a taxidermist," Sedaris said in a chat on Barnes and Noble.com. According to the Boston Phoenix, his collection of stuffed dead animals includes a squirrel, two fruit bats, four Boston terriers and a baby ostrich.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, he's what he said:

I guess it would be Cathedral by Raymond Carver. His sentences are very simple and straightforward, and he made writing seem deceptively easy—the kind of thing anyone could do if they put their mind to it. (From Barnes & Noble.)

A Prayer for the Dying Essay

Today, read over the following discussion questions and write an essay response to one of them referring to specific text evidence.  You may use your books.

Develop your response using specific examples from the book.  Cite page numbers in MLA format. These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!).  How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--(Question #8--The Things They Carried)? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...

Continue to work on your second person short story as well and any other missing work.

 Some excellent discussion starters:

Link to blog:

http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/

1)  A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.”  How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote?  Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:

[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.

What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness?  When did you first recognize that all was not well with him?  Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book?  And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:

” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”

Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying? 
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing: 

O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.

Stewart O’Nan once said

“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”

In another interview, O’Nan says:

For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.

Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting?  Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—– 
5)  Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:

When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.

Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man?  Is he a moral man?  Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.”  Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:

“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.

Which do you think it is, if either?
—– 
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying?  Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—– 
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:

“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”

Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence?  Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?

Interview with Stewart O'Nan

Interview with O'Nan Prayer for the Dying

Weekly Wire
The Boston Phoenix The Curse of O'Nan
In his new novel, Stewart O'Nan explores the landscape of affliction.

By Chris Wright

MAY 10, 1999:

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING, by Stewart O'Nan. Holt, 208 pages, $22.

A novelist friend of mine, upon hearing that I was about to interview Stewart O'Nan, asked me to relay a question. "Why," she wanted to know, "do you write so many damn books?" And it's a good question. Since 1993, the 38-year-old Pittsburgh native (and Connecticut resident) has published four novels and one book of short stories, all to high critical acclaim. Indeed, during the past six years, O'Nan has shown himself to be not only prolific, but also one of America's most thoughtful and versatile young novelists -- a fact rubber-stamped a few years back when the literary magazine Granta placed him on its much-heralded Top 40 list of young American writers.

A large part of O'Nan's appeal is in the mind-boggling variety of his subject matter. From plumbing the tormented psyche of a Vietnam vet to spinning the self-serving memoirs of a female death-row inmate, O'Nan has proved himself willing to explore a wide range of psychological, historical, and geographical landscapes. In his latest novel, A Prayer for the Dying, O'Nan takes us to late-19th-century rural Wisconsin, where a town named Friendship finds itself on the wrong end of an Old Testament double whammy: pestilence and fire.

Stopping by the Phoenix offices for an interview en route to the Red Sox season opener, O'Nan agrees that his literature has a tendency to roam. "I have a short attention span," he deadpans. "I'm interested in all these different people. It's like when you see someone on the street, you want to follow them home."

Not that you'd really want to follow any of O'Nan's characters anywhere. "Typically," he says, "I write about people who are completely fucked up." Then again, we'd all be a little fraught if we were in a Stewart O'Nan novel. Regardless of the disparity of their circumstances, all of O'Nan's characters are pretty much in the same spot: wedged between hope and despair, having the life squeezed out of them.

Jacob Hansen, the unlucky protagonist of A Prayer for the Dying, is certainly no exception. Described by O'Nan as a "Christian existential horror book," A Prayer for the Dying is O'Nan's grimmest to date, putting Jacob through a series of trials that make the suffering visited upon Job seem like a tough episode of America's Funniest Home Videos.

As O'Nan puts it, "It's not the feel-good comedy of the year."

The story opens blithely enough:

High summer and Friendship's quiet. The men tend the shimmering fields. Children tramp the woods, wade the creeks, sound the cool ponds. . . . Cows twitch and flick.

You like it like this, the bright, languid days.

The "you" refers to Jacob (the book is narrated in the second person). An earnest, God-fearing Civil War veteran, Jacob is an almost absurdly good man. He not only serves as Friendship's constable, preacher, and undertaker, but also manages to be an attentive husband and doting father in his spare time. Of course, ministering to a community's spiritual, judicial, and corporal needs is challenging enough at the best of times. In the worst of times, it's downright ravaging. As Jacob is about to discover.

A stranger's corpse is discovered in the woods behind a local farm, "belly-down beside the smudge of a dead campfire." Having just tended to that emergency, Jacob finds another body, this time a woman, also lying face down. She's not dead, but mad, raving about having seen Jesus. Both people, it turns out, are afflicted with diphtheria, an infectious and fatal disease. These first two cases establish a terrible momentum that continues throughout the book. Before long, the good people of Friendship are dropping like flies -- and the flies are having a field day.

O'Nan says A Prayer for the Dying was inspired by Michael Lesy's historical montage Wisconsin Death Trip, which documented a real-life diphtheria epidemic that swept through the region in the 1890s. "I ran into the book in a library somewhere," he says. "I read it and had this weird, queasy reaction to it, that gothic feeling of being terrified of and attracted by something at the same time. I thought, if I could get that feeling into a book, into a piece of prose, that would be amazing."

He got it, all right. Though A Prayer for the Dying invites obvious comparisons to Albert Camus's The Plague, O'Nan insists his book owes a far heavier debt to George Romero's schlock-horror film The Night of the Living Dead, which, he says, "is about isolation, about people boarded up in houses, about crazy people wandering a landscape that is empty and beautiful."

The book certainly contains more than its fair share of gothic horror. O'Nan seems to delight in offering up descriptions of Jacob's gory undertaking duties (a creepiness heightened by the fact that he insists on chatting with the corpses while he nicks their ankles and drains them of their blood). He describes the effects of diphtheria with a poet's scrutiny ("eyes sunken in violet pits, cheeks creased and hollow"). And, as the disease spreads, a horrible madness grips the town. People are shot, poisoned, burned alive. There are intimations of necrophilia and cannibalism.

The really disturbing aspect of the book, though, is in watching Jacob's saintly commitment to his duties contort into a kind of mania. "You'll do what's best for everyone," he says in the early days of the outbreak. But, as Jacob discovers, doing the right thing is by no means a clear-cut proposition. (In an awful ironic twist, Jacob's compulsive desire to observe proper care for the dead is instrumental in spreading the disease.)

Inevitably, Jacob goes off his rocker. When his own family appears to have been stricken, he even loses his grasp on his faith. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that Jacob's motives are more personal than spiritual anyway, and we start to question his faith. This is part of O'Nan's brilliance: he forces us into the same moral snarls as his characters, and then leaves us to work our own way out of them.

Moral complexity notwithstanding, O'Nan also has an ability to create situations of near-farcical dreadfulness. He pushes the macabre to the edge of comedy, and then holds it there. What next? you think, and before you're finished formulating the question another very bad thing is batting you over the head. And that's what makes for a good horror novel, says O'Nan.

As in the best horror novels, though, much of what's really frightening about A Prayer for the Dying lies in what's left unsaid. One of the creepiest moments of the book, for instance, occurs during a scene of supposed domestic bliss:

After dinner Marta plays the melodeon and the two of you sing. She falls off the stool but you prop her up, set her foot on the pedals, her fingers on the keys, help her find middle C. Jesus Our Redeemer. He Will Overcome. Amelia plays on the floor with her cornhusk doll.

Marta and Amelia are Jacob's wife and child, and we're pretty sure by this point that they're dead. But the confirmation is horrible for its insidiousness, the realization made all the more eerie because it creeps up on us, reveals itself to us in this awful vision of madness.

The book is equally murky in the many philosophical questions it raises. Faith and responsibility, good and evil, despair and salvation -- it's not what's revealed about these things that makes their presence so powerful, it's what we're left to figure out for ourselves. At one point during one of his many self-inquisitions, Jacob asks:

Who are you angry with?

Not God.

No? Who else is there? Is this the devil's work?

It must be, you think, but uncertainly. It must be, but you're confused.

In this instance, as with the rest of the book, the second-person narrative adds an air of immediacy and universality, and takes Jacob's search for answers to the reader. After all, you are confused, too. There's a gauze of indeterminacy hanging over the entire novel, and for this reason it's a challenging, even difficult book to read.

"Good," says O'Nan. Though he'd like us to be entertained by his books, he also wants us to face up to questions we might otherwise "shrug off." In this, he likens A Prayer for the Dying to an "abusive but loving parent: half the time it's cooing to you and patting you on the back, and the other half it's beating the crap out of you."

In meting out misery and pain to his beleaguered characters, though, O'Nan more often takes on the role of vengeful deity than abusive parent.

"Oh yeah," O'Nan says, "there is that placement of the novelist as God. You worry about that, but you try to be as generous as possible. If you're treating your characters as little game pieces, you would never have anything of consequence. Emotionally, you have to be very close to your characters. You have to love them."

But if O'Nan loves the characters in A Prayer for the Dying, he's got a funny way of showing it. At one point, as Jacob crafts a casket for his daughter, he asks, "Will there be anything harder than this?" And there most certainly will be. Toward the end of the book, as the diphtheria epidemic spreads like wildfire, O'Nan introduces a real wildfire into the proceedings. Having gone from bad to worse, the lot of Friendship's inhabitants goes to absolute worst, and the dutiful Jacob is reduced to the role of helpless onlooker.

Ultimately, O'Nan says, the question underlying all of his work is "When do you give up?" Which, he concedes, "is a horrible question to ask, but it's a question that a lot of people have to face." Then, echoing Hamlet's famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, "That's the question."

Just don't expect O'Nan to supply the answer.

A Prayer for the Dying

AGENDA:
1. Second person short stories: Due Friday, Jan. 9.  Continue to work on your short stories by revising and editing if you have a first draft.  If not, work on completing your story.

2. A Prayer for the Dying:  Finish the book for essay test on Thursday
In the meantime, THINK, PAIR, SHARE (refer to text)
Discuss with a partner the following questions and post a response on the blog:

4. What role does religious faith play in the story? How does it influence Jacob, Chase, and other citizens of Friendship? Is their faith rewarded?
5. Jacob is a veteran of the Civil War. How does his experience there affect the way he behaves in the crisis in Friendship? How did the war change him?
6. How would you describe the relationship between Jacob and Doc? How do their different ideas about the world lead to different strategies for handling the outbreak in Friendship?
7. How does Jacob’s relationship with Marta affect his behavior in the outbreak? How do his priorities as a father and husband conflict with his responsibility to the town?
8. How do you interpret the book’s ending? What is Jacob choosing when he returns to Friendship? What do you imagine happening to him next?
9. Is Jacob sane at the end of the book? How does the author demonstrate the changes in his mind as conditions worsen?
10. “You’ve stopped believing in evil,” the narrator says of Jacob early in the story (p. 6). “Is that a sin?” Is there evil in this story? Does Jacob come to see it by the end?
11. How do the book’s two epigraphs relate to each other? Why do you think the author chose them?
12. Jacob is committed throughout the book to saving Friendship, and willing to sacrifice himself if necessary. Is he naïve? Does his commitment to principle do more harm than good in the end?