American Literary Traditions
Midterm (March 26, 1997)
Randy Bass (English)

Study Guide

Midterm Exam

Spring '97 Midterm Study Guide

Study Guide Here are some themes that will likely be on the exam. The emphasis of the exam will be comparative between two or three books. In most cases, I want you to be thinking not only about particular themes or issues, but how those (comparative) themes relate to the way the novels work as literary artifacts. That is, be thinking both about themes and the authors' strategies of writing and narrative structure. There will be several questions on passages and specfiic issues, and a couple longer questions. I will ask both kinds of questions from the list of issues and examples below.

Three Examples: Here's one example of a question that uses a passage merely as a prompt:

1. In the chapter called the "Spirit-Spout," the narrator describes Ahab this way: "While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked." (254)

Here Ahab is described as straddling "life and death" and indeed throughout the book he is described as a man and as something more, or else. In this and other ways, Ahab is like the character Beloved, who herself straddles the world of life and death. Either taking up that idea, or others, compare the characters Ahab and Beloved in their respective novels? How are they alike or different in the ways that they make an impact on the worlds they inhabit?

Here's one example of where I would want you to speak directly to a single passage, and its relation to the book overall:

2. At the end of chapter 2 (p.68), Twain writes: The culprits flung themselves prone, in an ecstasy of gratitude, and kissed his feet, declaring that they would never forget his goodness and never cease to pray for him as long as they lived. They were sincere, for like a god he had stretched forth his mighty hand and closed the gates of hell against them. He knew, himself, that he had done a noble and gracious think, and was privately well pleased with his magnanimity; and that night he set the incident down in his diary, so that his son might read it in after years, and be thereby moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself.

How is this passage prophetic? How is it ironic, given the events of the book? What are some of the key words in the passage that connect with PW's major themes? How might the tone and meaning of the passage relate to the book's larger arguments?

And finally, here is an example of a question that presents two passages from each book to set up a comparison:

3. From Pudd'nhead Wilson: "Why were niggers and whites made? What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is this awful difference made between white and black?...How hard the nigger's fate seems, this morning! -- ye until last night such a thought never entered my head." (117)

From Beloved: Except for an occasional request for color she said practically nothing--until the afternoon of the last day of her life when she got out of bed, skipped slowly to the door of the keeping room and announced to Sethe and Denver the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. "They don't know when to stop," she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the qulit and left them to hold that thought forever. (104) Discuss Tom's and Baby Suggs' respective revelations about whites and blacks, and their impact on the construction of white/black relations (or whiteness and blackness) in the two novels.

Themes and topics from which I will select the short answer questions:

4. Sethe and Roxy as representations of motherhood. 5. The construction of manhood in Moby-Dick and Beloved. 6. The idea of the "monstrous" in Moby-Dick and Beloved. 7. Birth, family, and genealogy in Beloved and Puddn'head Wilson 8. The interaction of stories and storytelling on the narrative structure of the novels, especially Beloved and Moby-Dick. 9. Money, property, capital, and ownership in all three novels. 10. How the reader's knowledge of events is manipulated and controlled in all three books. How does the narrative style address the reader in terms of suspense, deferral of information, mysteries, prophecies, confusion, clarity, resolution?

Broad themes and topics from which I will select the longer essay questions:

11. Whiteness/blackness as complementarities; whiteness/blackness as social constructions; whiteness/blackness represented by or made into metaphors.

12. Words, things, and signs. How do these books take up the idea that things often don't mean what they mean but mean other things? How are these books about the "relative" or "floating" quality of the relationship between words and things, signs and meaning, facts and truth.

13. The difference between "speaking the unspeakable" and "unspeakable things unspoken" and how each works in the novels.

14. Ties between individual and communal consciousness; ties between individual and communal conscience. How do the novels represent those ties; how do the novels construct those ties?

15. Good and evil.


American Literary Traditions
Randy Bass (English)
Spring '97 Midterm

Midterm I. Short Answer. Single passages--context and meaning.

For the following discuss the significance of each passage, in terms BOTH of its place in the novel (what is happening in this place in the book) and in broader terms such as those of theme, language, character development, or writing strategies, as well as how the passage resonates or recalls some other moment(s) in the book.

Write on three, one from each book.

From Pudd'nhead Wilson:

1. p. 157, Chapter 14:

'En you refuse' to fight a man dat kicked you, 'stid o' jumpin' at de chance! En you ain't got no mo' feelin den to come en tell me, dat fetched sich a po' low-down ornery rabbit into de worl'! Pah! it make me sick! It's de nigger in you, dat's what it is. Thirty-one parts o' you is white, en on'y one part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo' soul. 'Tain't wuth savin'; tain't wuth totin' out on a shovel en throwin' in de gutter. You has disgraced yo' birth! What would yo' pa think o' you? It's enough to make him turn in his grave.'

2. p. 215, Chapter 20.

'Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified--and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. This signature is not his face--age can change that beyond recognition; it is not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not his height, for duplicates of that exist, it is not his form, for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature is each man's very own--there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe!'

3. p. 68 (chapter 2): "The culprits flung themselves prone, in an ecstasy of gratitude, and kissed his feet, declaring that they would never forget his goodness and never cease to pray for him as long as they lived. They were sincere, for like a god he had stretched forth his mighty hand and closed the gates of hell against them. He knew, himself, that he had done a noble and gracious thing, and was privately well pleased with his magnanimity; and that night he set the incident down in his diary, so that his son might read it in after years, and be thereby moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself."

4. p. 229. "Those Extraordinary Twins"

"Much the same thing happened with 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it -- a most embarrassing circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the reader's reason. I did not know what was the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one....at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other -- kind of literary Caesarean operation."

From Beloved:

5. p. 251

"Denver thought she understood the connecton between her mother and Beloved; Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe's greatest fear was the same on Denver had in the beginning--that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant--what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, till, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life--Beloved might leave."

6. p. 70

"She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatch up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can't go back and add more."

7. p. 164

"This here Sethe was new. The ghost in her house didn't bother her for the very same reason a room and board witch with new shoes was welcome. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him."

8. p. 126:

"A truth that waved like a scarecrow in rye: they were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. " From Moby-Dick:

9. p. 178, chapter 36:

"That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! More intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare!"

10. p. 95, chapter 17.

"...I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, I argued, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters.

11. p. 568, chapter 125:

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness."

12. p. 289, chapter 56:

"For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiousity touching this Leviathan."

II. Essay. Write a short essay on the following comparative questions. Write on TWO. Be sure and address the two works in conjunction with each other (that is comparison and contrast), not merely, treatment of one book and then the other.

1. Using the two passages below as prompts, discuss the two ideas of "speaking the unspeakable" and "unspeakable things unspoken" in Beloved and Moby-Dick.

From the "Try-Works"in Moby-Dick: "As they narrated to each other thier unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkess, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul."

From Beloved: (p.199) "When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds. Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, reognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken."

2. Compare and contrast Roxy and Sethe as mothers forced into difficult choices and impossible situations.

3. In the chapter called the "Spirit-Spout," the narrator describes Ahab this way: "While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked." (254)

Here Ahab is described as straddling "life and death" and indeed throughout the book he is described as both human and inhuman, man and something other. In this and other ways, Ahab is like the character Beloved, who herself straddles the world of life and death. Either taking up that idea, or others, compare the characters Ahab and Beloved in their respective novels? How are they alike or different in the ways that they make an impact on the worlds they inhabit?

4. On page 99, Morrison writes of Sethe: "Her story was bearable because it was his as well--to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other--the things neither had word-shapes for--well, it would come in time: where they led him off to sucking iron; the perefect death of her crawling-already? baby."

Using this as a starting point, compare and contrast the strategies of "telling" in Moby-Dick and Beloved. How do these novels use stories and acts of telling in the context of the larger narrative?

5. Discuss the portrayal of the "monstrous" in Beloved and Moby-Dick. This might also include treatment of cannibalism and animalism.

6. Using any two of the three novels, discuss the relationship between the individual and the community. How are individuals tied to communities? How is this relationship represented in the novels? If the novels (by themselves or together) pose alternative models for that relationship, describe the alternatives.

7. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain writes (p.116): ‘Dey ain't another nigger in dis town dat's as high-bawn as you is. Now den, go ‘long! En jes you hold yo' head up as you is. Now den, go ‘long! En jes you hold yo head up as high as you want to -- you has de right, en dat I kin swah.'

Using this as a starting point, discuss how Pudd'nhead Wilson and Moby-Dick analyze (and play with) notions of nobility, genealogy, democracy, and equality.

8. Both Moby-Dick and Pudd'nhead Wilson are books obsessed with issues of doubling, twinning, and binaries. Discuss some ways that these themes play out in these two novels.

9. Compare and contrast the "Doubloon" chapter with the "interior monologue" chapters in Beloved (beginning on p. 200). What do these two sections taken together tell us about the novels' treatment of subjectivity, history, memory, and meaning? How do they function in the novels themselves, structurally?