That has nothing to do with the story.

Sometimes students will insert an editorial comment in their essays for my class. One student placed in parentheses the fact that she was going to begin typing a characters name differently because it was just too long and hard. While I expect that from 8th and 9th graders from time to time, I was taken [...]

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Shallow

I’ve noticed a pattern. Drink. Talk. Drink. Talk. Cab ride. Drink. Talk. Talk. Drink. Cab ride.
This sums up the plot in The Sun Also Rises through 8 chapters. And what about the talk? Hemingway reveals a great deal about relationships based upon drink! The conversations are shallow. Don’t get me wrong. Hemingway is a master [...]

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That’s a man you can respect.

At the end of the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee writes,
I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”
 
Why were they all [...]

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Integrity

Jenna and I are reading To Kill a Mockingbird together. The other night we came across a passage that held me up to the light and showed some deficiencies. Miss Maudie and Scout are discussing the saneness of Boo Radley and Scout says,
 
“You reckon he’s crazy?”
Miss Maudie shook her head. “If he’s not he should [...]

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What the night reveals.

At the end of chapter four in The Sun Also Rises, Jake is ruminating on Brett and their frustrated relationship. He says, “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
Why is it that night brings out our fears, our insecurities, our doubts? What brings [...]

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