Prose Identification 2 – Flashcards

Summary: When Dexter is 14 he is a caddy and meets Judy Jones. He quits and decides he is going to be successful so he can hang with people like her. He starts his own laundry business and gets really rich, meets Judy Jones again and she asks him to dinner. She tells him she is sad because a man she was seeing is poor and Dexter tells her he is extremely rich. They date for a while but she doesn't care about him. He gets engaged to Irene, has an affair with Judy. He goes to the war, comes home and learns she's in a miserable relationship. Characters: Dexter Green, Judy Jones

Summary: Summary: the story of a Charlie Wales, a former drunken party-goer who returns to Paris, the site of his former 1920s debauchery, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. Charlie sees his world with new eyes and is both shocked and appalled by the extravagance that characterized his former life. His return to Paris is prompted by his desire to try to regain custody of his daughter (Honoria) from his sister-in-law, who is wary of him because of his past lifestyle. His wife (Helen) died a year prior due to heart trouble while Charlie was in a sanatorium after a mental collapse. Charlie convinces his sister to allow him to take Honoria back to the U.S. with him. While at lunch with Honoria Charlie runs into two friends from his past, Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles, who try to get him to get out drinking, but he refuses. On the night that Charlie is finalizing his plans Duncan and Lorraine show up to his sister's house drunk and try to convince him to go with them. This causes his sister to change her mind about allowing Honoria to leave with him. Despondent, Charlie leaves the house and goes to the Ritz bar where he has only one drink, resolved to attempt to regain custody of Honoria again in 6 months time. The story is rooted in the financial crisis of its times. wrote the piece in December of 1930, when the good times of the Jazz Age had come to an end and America was headed into the Great Depression. Charlie's horror with his own former waste and self-destruction is Fitzgerald's condemnation of a society who drank away the '20s. Characters: Charlie Wales, Marion Peters, Honoria

Summary: story of Wing Biddlebaum, an eccentric, nervous man who lives on the outskirts of the town of Winesburg, Ohio. Despite having lived in Winesburg for twenty years, Biddlebaum has never become close to anyone, with the exception of George Willard, a young man who works as a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle. On this particular evening, Biddlebaum is pacing on his porch, hoping that George will visit. As he paces, he fiddles with his hands, which are famous for their dexterity and wanton behavior. He has difficulty controlling his hands, which have a tendency to wander inappropriately of their own accord. The last time he was talking with George, he jerked back in horror after finding himself starting to caress the young man's face. Biddlebaum's horror stems from his past as a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania, where he was named Adolph Myers. He was very talented, but during his passionate lectures, he would often caress the shoulders and heads of his pupils, and one boy accused him of molestation. The schoolteacher barely made it out of town with his life, changed his name, and moved to Winesburg, where he lives in a seclusion broken only by his friendship with George Willard. On this particular evening, George does not come to visit. Characters: Wing Biddlebaum, George Willard

Summary: Story about with Elizabeth Willard, George Willard's mother. She and her husband, Tom, run a boarding house in Winesburg. Elizabeth is frequently ill. Tom is embarrassed by his wife, and spends his time airing his grievances. He is a Democrat in a heavily Republican town, lamenting the fact that he should have achieved great things politically. The relationship between Elizabeth and her son is stiff and uncomfortable, and they frequently sit together for long periods of time without talking. One night, after Elizabeth has been in bed for several days, she realizes that George has not come to see her, and becomes concerned. She gets up and hears Tom haranguing their son, urging George to "wake up" and make something of himself. This infuriates Elizabeth, and she decides that she will kill her husband. Looking at herself in the mirror, she decides that she must make herself appear more impressive, more beautiful and terrible before she kills her husband. But her sudden burst of energy subsides, and her plan slips away. George enters and talks to her awkwardly for a moment about his intention to leave Winesburg, probably in a year or two. He goes out for a walk, leaving her alone in the dark house. Characters: Elizabeth Willard

Summary: Tells the story of Alice Hindman, who is twenty-seven, clerks at Winesburg's dry goods store, and still lives with her mother. Alice, we learn, was once the lover of a young man named Ned Currie, and after he went off to seek his fortune in Chicago, she remained faithful to him. For a long time, he wrote every day, but eventually he became swept up in his new life and forgot her. Now, ten years later, Alice still carries a torch for him. She feels herself getting older, but she cannot imagine herself marrying anyone but "Neddie." Eventually, she joins the local Methodist Church and attends weekly prayer meetings in order to break the dull routine of her life. Still, she feels a restlessness taking hold of her and a desperate need to be loved. One rainy night, she comes home from work and goes upstairs to get undressed. Seized by a strange urge, she runs outside in the rain naked and accosts an old man who is passing on the sidewalk. Suddenly ashamed, she rushes back inside and lies down to face the wall and accept "bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone." Characters: Alice Hindman, Ned Currie

Summary: Francis Macomber and his wife Margaret/Margot are on a big-game safari in Africa, guided by professional hunter Robert Wilson. Earlier, Francis had panicked when a wounded lion charged him. Margot mocks Macomber for this act of cowardice, and it is implied that she sleeps with Wilson. The next day the party hunts buffalo. Macomber and Wilson shoot 3 buffalo. Two of the buffalo are killed, but the first buffalo was only wounded and has gone into the bush. Macomber now feels confident, and he and Wilson proceed to track the wounded animal, paralleling the circumstances of the previous day's lion hunt. When they find the buffalo, it charges Macomber. Although he stands his ground and fires at it, his shots are too high. Wilson fires at the beast as well, but it keeps charging. Macomber kills the buffalo at the last second. At the same time, Margot had also fired a shot from the car, which instead hits Macomber in the skull and kills him. Margot falls to the ground and weeps Characters: Margot and Francis Macomber, Wilson

Summary: The story opens with Nick arriving by train at Seney, Michigan, to find that a fire has devastated the town. While following a road leading away from the town, he stops on a bridge where he observes trout in the river below. After, he hikes up a hill and rests at a burned stump. While smoking a cigarette, he discovers an ash-blackened grasshopper crawling on his sock, and detaches it. Later in the day he relaxes in a glade of tall pines and falls asleep. When he wakes, he hikes the last mile to the edge of the river where he sees the trout feeding in the evening light Carefully he pitches his tent, unpacks his supplies, cooks his dinner (spaghetti), fills his water bucket, heats a pot of coffee, and kills a mosquito before falling asleep. Early that morning, Nick fills a jar with 50 dew-heavy grasshoppers found under a log, eats breakfast, drinks sweetened coffee and makes a sliced onion sandwich. After checking and assembling his fly-fishing rod and tying on damp leader line, he walks to the river with a net hanging from his belt, a sack over his shoulder and the jar of grasshoppers dangling around his neck. Wading in the water, he fishes the shallows; he lands a trout that he releases. Moving into a pool of deep water, he hooks a large trout, which he loses. After a rest, he moves away from the deep water to the center of the river and catches two trout that he stows in his sack. Sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette and eating his onion sandwich, he thinks about fishing the deep water of the swamp, but decides to wait for another day. At the log in the river, he kills, guts and cleans the two trout before returning to camp. Characters: Nick Adams

Summary: Abner Snopes, the father of Sartoris Snopes, is being driven out of town after burning down his landlord's barn. In the court case that opens the story and in which Sartoris is initially called to testify, no palpable proof can point to Abner as the culprit, but the Snopes family is ordered to leave the county. They move to a new place where Abner is to work as a sharecropper for Major de Spain, but Abner cannot seem to control his pyromania and hatred for society. Shortly after arriving at his new position, Abner ruins one of Spain's rugs beyond repair. Major de Spain levies on Abner a fine of 20 bushels of corn against the price of the rug. At court, a Justice of the Peace reduces the fine to ten bushels of corn. Feeling once again wronged, Abner makes preparations to set fire to Major de Spain's barn. Sarty warns Major de Spain of his father's intentions to burn down his barn and then flees in the direction of his father. He is soon overtaken by Major de Spain on his horse and jumps into the ditch to get out of the way. Sarty hears three gun shots, but who gets shot is never revealed Characters: Sartoris Snopes, Abner Snopes, Lennie Snopes,

Summary: Dave Saunders buys a pistol with some of the money he has earned for being a field hand for Mr. Hawkins, because he wants to be a man. His parents know he bought it but he hides it from his them anyways. He takes it to work with him and when he practices shooting, he kills Mr. Hawkins's Mule, Jenny. He admits to what he has done. His father tells him to sell the gun back to start paying back Mr. Hawkins for his dead mule. Instead, Dave takes the gun and runs away on a train. Characters: Dave Saunders, Mr. and Mrs. Saunders, Mr. Hawkins, Joe

Summary: The action begins in the morning, just after breakfast. Mary has returned to her family recently after receiving treatment for morphine addiction. Edmund has in recent weeks begun to cough very violently, and we learn later on in the play that, as Tyrone and Jamie suspect, he has tuberculosis. Throughout the course of the play, we slowly find out that Mary is still addicted to morphine, much to the disappointment of her family members. In between these discoveries, however, the family constantly revisits old fights and opens old wounds left by the past. Tyrone is constantly blamed for his own stinginess, which may have led to Mary's morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat the pain caused by the death of a child in childbirth. Mary, on the other hand, is never able to let go of the past or admit to the painful truth of the present, the truth that she is addicted to morphine and her youngest son has tuberculosis. They all argue over Jamie and Edmund's failure to become successes as their father had always hoped they would become. Characters: James, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund Tyrone

Summary: Grandmother tries to convince her son Bailey to take the family vacation to Tennessee instead of Florida. The family goes to Florida anyways. On the way she talks the whole time about kids being more respectful back in the day. Stop at a diner and learn of an escaped convict called "The Misfit". Grandmother tells June Star and John Wesley (grandkids) about a nearby home with secret passages and they want to visit. They get in an accident. A car pulls up and 3 men with guns get out. They kill the family one by one. The grandma pleads for her life. She tries flattering the misfit, touching him, telling him he's one of her children, talks about Jesus. He gets extra mad about Jesus. "There's no pleasure but meaness." He shoots her 3 times. When the accomplice finishes murdering the family, The Misfit takes a moment to clean his glasses, concluding "she have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Characters: June Star, The Misfit, The Grandmother, Bailey, and John Wesley

Summary: Meatball Mulligan throws a lease-breaking party at his apartment in Washington, D.C. in early February of 1957. His guests are a colorful bunch, including Sandor Rojas, an "ex-Hungarian Freedom fighter," and the avant-garde Duke di Angelis quartet comprised of Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco who together perform an original piece in complete silence. Saul, a neighbor of Mulligan's, comes in through the window after an argument with his wife concerning communication theory and the tendency for noise to "screw up your signal," making for "disorganization in the circuit." The party degenerates during the course of the story into a chaotic mess: more guests arrive with more booze, drunken Navymen barge in mistaking the place for a 'hoorhouse,' a woman almost drowns herself in the shower, the fridge needs repair. Meatball decides to take action.Meanwhile, upstairs in the apartment above lives a man named Callisto in a hermetically sealed hothouse with a half-alien woman named Aubade who perceives all sensory input as sound. Callisto clutches a dying bird to his chest while expounding on the nature of Thermodynamics and its theoretical extension beyond the limits of physics into the realms of society and culture as well: just as all closed systems lose energy over time until a 'heat-death' occurs wherein motion ceases, so too does culture have a tendency to lose differentiation and slide toward what Callisto terms 'the Condition of the More Probable.' Entropy, then, which Callisto defines as 'the measure of disorganization for a closed system,' is valuable in that it is "an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in [the] world" such as the consumerist trend away from difference and toward sameness. Often Aubade checks the temperature outside, which has remained at a constant 37 deg. Fahrenheit for a number of days despite the drastic change in weather. The story ends with the death of the bird Callisto has attempted to sustain through the transfer of heat from his own body to that of the sick animal. Aubade, finally comprehending Callisto's thoughts, punches out the windows of their apartment/self-contained ecosystem and sits with Callisto to await "the moment of equilibrium" between their world and the world outside. Characters: Meatball Mulligan, Callisto, Aubade

Summary: After seeing a pack of wolves playing in a river the hunters first reaction is to shoot them. As he watches the wolves die he realizes that he has damaged the ecosystem. To think like a mountain means to have a complete appreciation for the profound interconnectedness of the elements in the ecosystems. (First person) Characters: Wolves

Summary: There is a need for a way of "dealing with human's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. (First person)

A town where a spell comes and destroys the animals and plants. Everythang is dying and it is because of the people. Then, becomes prose about the dangers of DDT.

Summary: Explanation about what eating responsibly means. Eating is an agricultural act. Think about where your food comes from.

Summary: On an early August morning in Harney County, Florida, fanatic bass fisherman Bobby Clinch takes his bass boat out onto the lake. A few hours later, he is found floating dead in that same lake. Private investigator R.J. Decker is hired by sugar cane tycoon Dennis Gault, another fanatic bass fisherman, to prove that celebrity fisherman Richard "Dickie" Lockhart, Gault's main rival on the fishing tournament circuit, is a cheat. Decker, an expert photographer, used to work for a newspaper, but was fired, and served a short prison sentence, after assaulting a teenaged kid trying to steal camera equipment out of his car (his ex-wife, Catherine, playfully nicknamed him "Rage" on account of his temper). Investigating Lockhart's hometown in Harney County, Florida, Decker looks up an old newspaper friend, a laconic reporter named Ott Pickney. Finding the local bass fishing guides too expensive, Decker takes Ott's advice and meets a reclusive hermit who lives in the woods, calling himself "Skink." While teaching Decker about fishing, he mentions seeing Bobby Clinch on the lake on the morning he died. The strange thing is, he wasn't fishing. Attending Bobby's funeral, Decker meets Elaine "Lanie" Gault, Dennis's sister, a former fashion model who confides to Decker that she and Bobby were lovers. She tells Decker that Dennis hired Bobby to catch Lockhart first, only she believes Lockhart had Bobby killed. When Decker mentions her suspicions to Ott, Ott is skeptical and dismissive; the coroner ruled Bobby Clinch's death an accident (the result of a crash while joyriding) and besides, a murder over fishing is too outlandish to be believed. However, when Ott interviews Bobby's widow, he also discovers clues that Bobby wasn't fishing. Tracking down the junked remains of his boat, Ott discovers signs of sabotage. Unfortunately, at that moment he is tracked down and murdered. After finding his body, Skink and Decker are both committed to nailing the likely culprit, Dickie Lockhart. They tail Lockhart to his latest fishing tournament, on Lake Maurepas in Louisiana, but inadvertently photograph the wrong gang of cheaters, and Lockhart wins the tournament anyway. Decker is dispirited, but Skink tells him not to worry, adding, "worse comes to worst, I'll just shoot the SHMucker," to Decker's alarm. Later, he returns to their hotel room and finds Lanie waiting for him. They sleep together, but after her drops her off at her hotel, he notices lights on at the lakeside. Going to investigate, he finds Dickie Lockhart floating in the weigh tank, clubbed to death. Assuming Skink is the culprit, Decker quickly and quietly leaves Louisiana and drives back to Florida. But when he returns home, he finds the Miami police, led by Detective Al Garcia, waiting for him. Skink intercepts Decker and tells him the bad news: Decker has been framed. The whole assignment from Gault was a set-up, allowing Gault to kill his hated rival and put the blame on Decker. Meanwhile, Lockhart's corporate sponsors, the mammoth Outdoor Christian Network, led by TV evangelist Reverend Charles "Charlie" Weeb, loses no time in announcing a Lockhart memorial fishing tournament, a publicity stunt to boost sales at "Lunker Lakes", a massive housing development built by Weeb on the very edge of the Everglades, targeted almost exclusively at bass fishing enthusiasts. In reality, advance sales of the condominiums at Lunker Lakes have been going very slowly, and Reverend Weeb is becoming increasingly desperate, as the Outdoor Christian Network has so much money sunk into the project that its failure will mean his own financial ruin.