In the Lake of the Woods

AGENDA:

EQ: What is accomplished by O'Brien's nonlinear narrative scheme (see question 2)


Take a quick quiz::

http://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/11227-in-the-lake-of-the-woods

Please discuss questions 1-4 with a partner and post your responses on the blog!

Discussion Questions

In the Lake of the Woods

by Tim O’Brien

1. Almost from this novel's first page we know that Kathy Wade will vanish, and it is not long before we discover that her disappearance will remain unsolved. What, then, gives In the Lake of the Woodsits undeniable suspense? What does it offer in place of the revelations of traditional mysteries?
2. Instead of a linear narrative, in which action unfolds chronologically, Tim O'Brien has constructed a narrative that simultaneously moves forward and backward in time: forward from John and Kathy's arrival at the cabin; backward into John's childhood, and beyond that to Little Big Horn and the War of Independence. It also moves laterally, into the "virtual" time that is represented by different hypotheses about Kathy's fate. What does the author accomplish with this narrative scheme? In what ways are his different narrative strands connected?
3. What does O'Brien accomplish in the sections titled "Evidence"? What information do these passages impart that is absent from the straightforward narrative? How do they alter or deepen our understanding of John as a magician, a politician, a husband, and a soldier who committed atrocities in wartime? What connections do they forge between his private tragedy and the pathologies of our public life and history? Does the testimony of (or about) such "real" people as Richard Nixon, William Calley, or George Custer lend greater verisimilitude to John's story or remind us that it--and John himself--are artifices?
4. Who is the narrator who addresses us in the "Evidence" sections? Are we meant to see him as a surrogate for the author, who also served in Vietnam and revisited Thuan Yen many years after the massacre? (See Tim O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me," in The New York Times Magazine, October 3, 1994, pp. 48-57.) In what ways does O'Brien's use of this narrator further explode the conventions of the traditional novel?
5. One of the few things that we know for certain about John is that he loves Kathy. But what does John mean by love? How do John's feelings for his wife resemble his hopeless yearning for his father, who had a similar habit of vanishing? In what circumstances does John say "I love you"? What vision of love is suggested by his metaphor of two snakes devouring each other? Why might Kathy have fallen in love with John?
6. Although it is easy to see Kathy as the victim of John's deceptions, the author at times suggests that she may be more conscious (and therefore more complex) than she first appears. We learn, for example, that Kathy has always known about John's spying and even referred to him as "Inspector Clouseau," an ironic counterpoint to John's vision of himself as "Sorcerer." At a critical moment she rebuffs her husband's attempt at a confession. And in the final section of "Evidence," we get hints that Kathy may have planned her own disappearance. Are we meant to see Kathy as John's victim or as his accomplice, like a beautiful assistant vanishing inside a magician's cabinet?
7. Why might John have entered politics? Is he merely a cynical operator with no interest in anything but winning? Or, as Tony Carbo suggests, might John be trying to atone for his actions in Vietnam? Why might the author have chosen to leave John's political convictions a blank?
8. John's response to the horrors of Thuan Yen is to deny them: "This could not have happened. Therefore it did not." Where else in the novel does he perform this trick? How does John's way of coping with the massacre compare to the psychic strategies adopted by William Calley or Paul Meadlo? Do any of O'Brien's characters seems capable of acknowledging terrible truths directly? How does In the Lake of the Woods treat the matter of individual responsibility for evil?
9. Each of this novel's hypotheses about events at the cabin begins with speculation but gradually comes to resemble certainty. The narrator suggests that John and Kathy Wade are ultimately unknowable, as well; that any attempt to "penetrate...those leaden walls that encase the human spirit" can never be anything but provisional. Seen in this light, In the Lake of the Woods comes to resemble a magician's trick, in which every assertion turns out to be only another speculation. Given the information we receive, does any hypothesis about what happened at Lake of the Woods seem more plausible than the others? With what certainties, if any, does this novel leave us? 

WRITING:Work on nonlinear nrratives

EVENT: Panel discussion this evening 7 pm  Playwriting!

CONTEST: Virgilio Haiku contest

HMWK: Finish In the Lake of the Woods for Friday!

In the Lake of the Woods

AGENDA:
Finish reading In the Lake of the Woods

Continue working on study guide 2

WRITING:  Work on nonlinear narratives

IIn the Lake of the Woods

AGENDA:

Morning Reflection:
http://www.ted.com/talks/maysoon_zayid_i_got_99_problems_palsy_is_just_one

Study Guide--Lake of the Woods Ch. 8-12

READING LINKS:   Fractured or nonlinear narrative:
http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/Fractured-Novels-Narratives/665 

https://cgblake.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/linear-vs-non-linear-narrative/ 

http://litreactor.com/columns/out-of-order-a-discussion-of-nonlinear-narrative-structure

View Lake of the Woods video, part 1

WRITING: Work on fractured narratives:

HMWK: 

My Lai Massacre

Good morning everyone! This will be an interesting, but disturbing class. The material is graphic and crucially important to understanding O'Brien's historical context in In the Lake of the Woods.

AGENDA:

EQ: Why is the background of the My Lai massacre so important to understanding O'Brien's novel In the Lake of the Woods?



-We will be watching various sections of a PBS documentary on the My Lai Massacre

PBS Documentary

PBS Documentary
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BMTTXC/ref=atv_terms_dp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0z_nfzYNjY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWchy6ykNnQ

-After watching the documentary, you will explore an interview with Tim O'Brien about his experiences in Vietnam

Interview with Tim O'Brien 

-After viewing the documentary and exploring the interview, answer the following questions (post on the blog):

1. Has watching the documentary and reading the interview on My Lai changed your reading of In the Lake of the Woods by O'Brien? Do you feel as though you can sympathize with Wade on some level, or are his actions completely unforgivable? 

2. What was your prior knowledge of the massacre? Do you think the fact that the My Lai Massacre is somewhat mysterious and unknown to many people adds to the complexity of the novel? How so? Do you think that if something of this caliber is concealed by those involved that the general public will ever know the true story? 

3. How does having some type of historical context incorporated into a fictional text effect you as a reader? What historical events or time periods are you considering for your own writing piece (this can be a list)?


WRITING: Speculative fiction stories due!
HMWK:  Be sure you've read Ch. 8-12 for Friday discussion

Discussion In the Lake of the Woods

AGENDA:

Read over the first chapter for literary analysis.

Look over the study guide and the following article:

Interview with Tim O'Brien

http://www.leaderu.com/marshill/mhr04/tim1.html

Speculative fiction stories due.

HMWK: Read Ch. 8-12

In the Lake of the Woods

AGENDA:

MORNING REFLECTION:  

DISCUSSION of Raymond Carver's stylistics and dirty realism.  On the blog:
Which story did you respond to most favorably?
What as a writer can you learn from Carver's style?  Would you try to write in that style?

Go to library to pick up In the Lake of the Woods.  Return Carver and Age of Miracles (we need your books for the 10th grade!)


WORK ON SPECULATIVE FICTION STORIES!
HMWK: Read to CH. 7 O'Brien

In the Lake of the Woods

On its surface, In the Lake of the Woods suggests the classic locked-room mystery turned on its head. Sometime between the night and late morning of September 19, 1986, a woman vanishes near Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota, "where the water was everything, vast and very cold, and where there were secret channels and portages and bays and tangled forests and islands without names." While the traditional locked-room mystery presents investigators - and readers - with the seemingly impossible, the disappearance of Kathy Wade poses too many possibilities, a wilderness of hypotheses. There are too many places she could have gone, too many things that could have happened to her.

As Tim O'Brien gradually reveals in this haunting, morally vertiginous novel, there were too many reasons for Kathy to vanish. All of them are connected to her husband, John, an attractive if morally confused 40-year-old politician whose career has lately ended in a defeat so humiliating that it has driven the Wades to an isolated cabin in the Minnesota woods.

A long-buried secret has resurfaced to bury John alive; perhaps it has buried Kathy along with him. John's disgrace originated in "a place with secret trapdoors and tunnels and underground chambers populated by various spooks and goblins, a place where magic was everyone's hobby...a place where the air itself was both reality and illusion, where anything might instantly become anything else."

Its geographic epicenter is the village of Thuan Yen in Vietnam. It was there, eighteen years before, that John Wade was transformed from a boy with a gift for performing magic tricks (his platoon-mates knew him as "Sorcerer") into an entranced killer.

What happened at Thuan Yen was not fiction. The events that took place there were widely reported and documented in official U.S. Army hearings and are known today as the My Lai massacre. At the heart ofIn the Lake of the Woods is its brutal re-creation of this wound in John Wade's history and his country's. Because Wade was one of many killers, Tim O'Brien intersperses his narrative with the testimony of real figures like Lieutenant Rusty Calley and U.S. Army Investigator William V. Wilson--not to mention Presidents Richard Nixon and Woodrow Wilson. Just as John's and Kathy's associates--his mother and campaign manager, her sister and co-worker--try to decipher the events at Lake of the Woods, those historical witnesses posit partial explanations for America's mysteriously aligned obsessions with politics and violence.

Clausewitz observed that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Tim O'Brien suggests that politics, at least in its American variety, is a continuation of needs more basic and more terrible even than the need for power. The craving for love, he reminds us, can drive the human soul toward acts of desperation, deceit, and even violence.

For O'Brien, as for the unnamed investigator who is his narrator, all explanations are hypotheses rather than proofs. Beyond the mystery of Kathy's disappearance and John's role in it, and even beyond the mystery of My Lai, are other riddles: What predisposed John to become a murderer? What sort of magic enabled him to make his past vanish for twenty years, and what disappeared along with it? How could he love Kathy with such self-annihilating ferocity while keeping an essential part of himself hidden from her? Was Kathy a victim of John's deceptions or a participant in them? Is John an autonomous moral agent or another victim-of a bad childhood or a bad war or the murderous pastel sunlight of Vietnam? With In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien has reinvented the novel as a magician's trick box equipped with an infinite number of false bottoms. Kathy's disappearance remains a "magnificent giving over to pure and absolute Mystery." John believes that "to know is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed." This brave and troubling novel neither betrays nor disappoints, but brings the reader into a direct confrontation with the insoluble enigmas of history, character, and evil.

Topics:


1. Almost from this novel's first page we know that Kathy Wade will vanish, and it is not long before we discover that her disappearance will remain unsolved. What, then, gives In the Lake of the Woods its undeniable suspense? What does it offer in place of the revelations of traditional mysteries?

2. Instead of a linear narrative, in which action unfolds chronologically, Tim O'Brien has constructed a narrative that simultaneously moves forward and backward in time: forward from John and Kathy's arrival at the cabin; backward into John's childhood, and beyond that to Little Big Horn and the War of Independence. It also moves laterally, into the "virtual" time that is represented by different hypotheses about Kathy's fate. What does the author accomplish with this narrative scheme? In what ways are his different narrative strands connected?

3. What does O'Brien accomplish in the sections titled "Evidence"? What information do these passages impart that is absent from the straightforward narrative? How do they alter or deepen our understanding of John as a magician, a politician, a husband, and a soldier who committed atrocities in wartime? What connections do they forge between his private tragedy and the pathologies of our public life and history? Does the testimony of (or about) such "real" people as Richard Nixon, William Calley, or George Custer lend greater verisimilitude to John's story or remind us that it--and John himself--are artifices?

4. Who is the narrator who addresses us in the "Evidence" sections? Are we meant to see him as a surrogate for the author, who also served in Vietnam and revisited Thuan Yen many years after the massacre? (See Tim O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me," in The New York Times Magazine, October 3, 1994, pp. 48-57.) In what ways does O'Brien's use of this narrator further explode the conventions of the traditional novel?

5. One of the few things that we know for certain about John is that he loves Kathy. But what does John mean by love? How do John's feelings for his wife resemble his hopeless yearning for his father, who had a similar habit of vanishing? In what circumstances does John say "I love you"? What vision of love is suggested by his metaphor of two snakes devouring each other? Why might Kathy have fallen in love with John?

6. Although it is easy to see Kathy as the victim of John's deceptions, the author at times suggests that she may be more conscious (and therefore more complex) than she first appears. We learn, for example, that Kathy has always known about John's spying and even referred to him as "Inspector Clouseau," an ironic counterpoint to John's vision of himself as "Sorcerer." At a critical moment she rebuffs her husband's attempt at a confession. And in the final section of "Evidence," we get hints that Kathy may have planned her own disappearance. Are we meant to see Kathy as John's victim or as his accomplice, like a beautiful assistant vanishing inside a magician's cabinet?

7. Why might John have entered politics? Is he merely a cynical operator with no interest in anything but winning? Or, as Tony Carbo suggests, might John be trying to atone for his actions in Vietnam? Why might the author have chosen to leave John's political convictions a blank?

8. John's response to the horrors of Thuan Yen is to deny them: "This could not have happened. Therefore it did not." Where else in the novel does he perform this trick? How does John's way of coping with the massacre compare to the psychic strategies adopted by William Calley or Paul Meadlo? Do any of O'Brien's characters seems capable of acknowledging terrible truths directly? How does In the Lake of the Woods treat the matter of individual responsibility for evil?

9. Each of this novel's hypotheses about events at the cabin begins with speculation but gradually comes to resemble certainty. The narrator suggests that John and Kathy Wade are ultimately unknowable, as well; that any attempt to "penetrate...those leaden walls that encase the human spirit" can never be anything but provisional. Seen in this light, In the Lake of the Woods comes to resemble a magician's trick, in which every assertion turns out to be only another speculation. Given the information we receive, does any hypothesis about what happened at Lake of the Woods seem more plausible than the others? With what certainties, if any, does this novel leave us?

More Carver

AGENDA:

Read "Are These Actual Miles"

MORNING REFLECTION: Radezia


  

In the short story “Are These Actual Miles?” Raymond Carver introduces a couple, that are trying to live the American dream, but can’t seem to live within their own means. Throughout the story, this couple struggles to be happy, emotionally and financially. This couple is faced with multiple situations that show how, as Ron Hansen puts it, “ethical grayness characterizes much of our human experiences”
From the beginning of the story, readers can clearly see that there are underlying problems within the couple’s relationship. When Toni goes out to convince a man to buy their car, “she puts on a new white blouse, wide lacy cuffs, the new two-piece suit, new heels”, clearly trying to impress the buyer (Carver 146). This detail in her appearance shows that she’s taken the time to look her best, making sure everything is perfect, even if it causes her to be late for the meeting. Is it because she wants to dress professionally, or is it because she wants to forget about the bankruptcy and enjoy an extravagant night out that she normally wouldn’t get?
Leo obviously knows how she sells– by flirting, maybe even by going a bit further, with the buyer. When she used to sell, “she signed him up [for children’s encyclopedias], even though he didn’t have kids” (Carver 146). This somehow led to them being married, which suggests that with Toni, there wasn’t really a line between persuasion and flirting with the customer. Just as the  wife is aware of how the use of her appearance can aide in her car sales, Leo is aware that she is using this very tactic. But he still lets her do it, because they are that deep in debt. This is where the ethical grayness comes in. Is it right that Toni should cheat on her husband since she’s the only one doing something to change their financial situation? Or is it right that Leo knows what’s about to happen, does not do anything to stop it, because he thinks the bankruptcy is his fault?
The readers can continually tell that there are more problems when Toni calls Leo, five hours after she left the house, and tells him she’s getting drinks with the businessman The fact that it takes five hours for Toni to meet the businessman and find a place to get drinks clearly shows the lack of communication within this couple’s relationship. Leo must suspect something, but he doesn’t ask–he doesn’t want to know the truth. This example shows that this couple obviously has communication problems. Leo, who has already “brought a woman home,” and Toni, who didn’t come home till dawn the next day, must have some idea what the other one is doing (Carver 147).They’re not addressing these issues, except Leo says, “We start over Monday. I mean it” (Carver 147). There are several instances in the story where Leo keeps repeating the word “Monday”. Monday is when the hearing is, and when Leo keeps repeating the word, to his wife, to the businessman, and to the readers, we recognize how important Monday really is. After Monday, what will happen with their possessions? What will happen to their marriage? This sentence shows the desperation to forget about everything that’s happened–the bankruptcy and the disloyalty. It’s like he’s telling Toni to do whatever tonight, it doesn’t matter, because they’re going to start over on Monday. This is most likely why he doesn’t ask Toni why it took five hours just to get drinks. Again, this shows the ethical grayness of the situation: does it make it okay for Toni to do whatever it takes to sell the car, even if it comes to adultery? Is it okay for Toni to cheat, since Leo already has?
A sense of anxiety and stress was portrayed throughout the entire story, which leads the readers to see how much stress Leo must’ve been feeling this entire time. One moment, they were living the high life– the next, they were bankrupt. “They buy what they want. If they can’t pay, they charge. They sign up” (Carver 148). This sentence characterizes the American Dream–they want what they can’t have. They want to provide a better life for their kids than what they had. Toni even mentions, “I had to do without when I was a kid…these kids are not going to do without” (Carver 148). So does that make it okay for them to purchase luxury items they can’t afford, if it makes their children have these items their parents didn’t have? Even Leo, feeling the pressure of keeping everything under control, admits “he is willing to be dead” (Carver 148). Is it okay for Leo to feel self pity for himself, because this situation frequently occurs? For Leo to surrender  because he’s lost control–with his money, his wife, his life–and he cannot gain it back?
Still, the question remains the same: Under certain circumstances, can what we perceive is wrong be changed into right? This is essentially the “ethical grayness” that Hansen has mentioned before, and this is the main question that occurs throughout most of the story.

Continue to work on speculative fiction

HMWK:  Finish reading Carver short stories