English 12-1    Mr. Mullen     In-class essay: The Things They Carried

Choose ONE passage from The Things They Carried. Write a 30-40 line essay in which you explain how the quote captures a key concept we introduced at the beginning of the course. Closely read the passage, focusing on the connotations and metaphorical values of specific words and phrases in the passage and the ironies they may generate You may refer to other parts of the novel, but do not summarize the plot. The essay will be scored according to the AP rubric.

Formats:

Written:

• SKIP LINES
• Name at the top
• First three words of the quote as the title

Word Document:

Go to Submission Guidelines

·         Clearly identify how the quote you chose captures a key concept  in the novel.

·         Read Closely. Consider the words, images, and metaphors that are most evocative of that theme.

·         Write clearly. The best writing expresses an idea in the simplest possible language.

·         You may use your text, but extensive direct quoting is unnecessary.

• Numbers in parentheses refer to the page on which the quote appears in the 1990 Broadway edition of the novel.

A sample passage and answer

1.       I was a coward. I went to the war. (61)

2.       In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe, “Oh.”(77)

3.       What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don’t make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you’re risking something. The endorphins start to flow, and the adrenaline, and you hold your breath and creep quietly through the moonlit nightscapes; you become intimate with danger; you’re in touch with the far side of yourself, as though it’s another hemisphere, and you want to string it out and go wherever the trip takes you and be host to all the possibilities inside yourself. Not bad, she’d said. Vietnam made her glow in the dark. She wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving. (114)

4.            Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him. (180)

5.       “This whole war,” [Rat] said. “You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs.” (223)

6.       I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story. (246)

Read an exemplary essay here: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PJ-Qq5qN5RZlpq61MiFLtHZeyFJP5BVnirtXIa3RtAY/edit?hl=en_US

Things They Carried Review Terms for Objective Test

Passages and page numbers for objective test