Dangling Modifiers and How to Correct Them
Tanning for my trip to Tahiti, the vacation looks promising.
Tanning for my trip to Tahiti, I am encouraged at the prospects of a good vacation.
Having read The Chocolate War, the assignment looks difficult.
Having read The Chocolate War, I find the assignment difficult.
Late for work, a suspension had to be drafted for Mr. Winkle T Tardy.
Late for work, Mr. Winkle T Tardy was handed a suspension form.
With sharp teeth, the bowl of dog food was devoured quickly.
With sharp teeth, my dog devoured the bowl of dog food efficaciously.
Not understanding grammar, the grammar quiz seemed difficult.
Not understanding grammar, Lara found the quiz difficult.
Suffering a nasty hyena bite in the buttocks, medicinal iodine was applied liberally.
Suffering a nasty hynea bite in the buttocks, I applied liberal amounts of medicinal iodine to my gaping wound.
Part One. The Novel's Darkness Results in Part from Its Characters' Lack of Free Will.
Examples:
Can you overcome your father's temper or are you doomed to have it?
If your parents are fat overeaters, are you doomed to be the same?
If your classmates cheat on the calculus exam and you resist cheating at first, will you eventually break down and join them?
If you're stalky and heavy set, can you diet and train your way to a life of svelte fitness?
If your parents are divorced, are you more likely to get a divorce?
If you live in a credit card society in which the average American is $1,6000 in credit card debt, are you doomed to be saddled with similar debt?
If your friends are all womanizers and arrogant bullies are you doomed to be the same? You've heard the saying: If you hang out with dogs, you get fleas.
Is Archie Costello doomed to live a life sequestered in arrogance, pride, and loneliness?
Is Jerry doomed to be manipulated by the tribe?
Is Brother Leon forever to be shackled by his sadistic tendencies?
Essay Strategy
If you focus on this theme in your essay, analyze the lack of free will in Jerry, Archie, Brother Leon, Obie, and Goober as it evident in the novel.
Sample Thesis:
The novel's main characters' Archie, Brother Leon, and even Jerry show they are shackled to the chains of determinism evidenced by ____________________, _______________________, ______________________, and ________________________.
Suggested Structure:
In your first page, explain the difference between free will and determinism using appropriate examples. Then in your thesis argue that free will is lacking in the novel’s characters who are beholden to psychological (irrational passions) and external determinism. The deterministic forces from which they have no free will are the lust for power, pride, corruption, revenge, the impulse to disdain the powerless, the pressure to conform, and the pressure to be obedient.
Part Two. Explaining Psychological Determinism
1. psychological determinism: your environment and social conditioning leave an indelible print on your personality that no degree of “free-will” can change or erase. You are a product of forces beyond your control. Also referred to as “naturalism.” The characters in the novel are slaves to compulsions that they don’t see or understand.
2. disaffected: the condition of being emotionally withdrawn, reserved in a condition of learned helplessness and cynicism, emotionally unreachable by the wall of defenses that were created long, long ago. We see learned helplessness in the depressed Jerry, Goober, and Archie. All 3 feel disconnected from others and in the novel all 3 betray themselves in one way or other.
3. Innocent child’s dream of the omniscient parent: Jerry begins to see that his father has settled for mediocrity, that he never strove to better himself and deep down he is disappointed in his father and even has contempt for him. Without a father to look up to, Jerry feels aimless.
4. Sadistic: taking pleasure in meanness, which is to say exacting cruelty upon others, especially the helpless. Brother Leon and Archie are examples of characters who have lost the ability to be happy except in the sick way of exacting cruelty against others. They've lost the ability to experience real pleasure and human connection and they are so isolated and self-centered that the only pleasure they can have is rooted in sadistic cruelty, inflicting suffering on others.
5. Post-traumatic stress disorder: depression, aggression, violence, and paranoia that results from repeated violent abuse. Sadly, we see that Goober suffers from it after doing one of the Assignments that sent Brother Eugene to the hospital.
6. Rite of passage; a significant event that marks the passing from innocence to initiation; dubious outsider to loyal tribal member; childhood to adulthood; placid passivity to rigorous curiosity In the novel, conformity is the rite of passage, either selling the chocolates or doing an Assignment. These displays of loyalty and obedience come with a price: Compromising one’s individual conscience.
Part Three. Psychological Determinism means certain experiences leave a permanent stamp on our identity. What forces in the environment can forever cripple us emotionally?
1. Abuse, the kind that Jerry and Goober suffer, results in post traumatic stress syndrome.
2. Rejection from a group results in a sadness and loneliness that results in withdrawal, depression, and seeking out a unconditional love from another source. Consider the lives of two baseball stars Bill Buckner and Chuck Knoblauch who now just spend time with their families. They have disappeared from the game of baseball.
3. Not getting unconditional love from your parents leaves a permanent hunger for love. Homeless teenagers spend their whole lives looking for unconditional love they didn’t find at home. Often I see them with dogs on the streets. There is a movie about this theme called Citizen Kane.
4. A teacher who humiliates you and “has it out for you” can have a permanent effect, making you distrust education, making you hostile toward school, and distrustful of authority in general.
5. Romantic betrayal can make you so distrustful that you make yourself ugly and throw banana peels in people’s path like a former landlady of mine who lived as a lonely miser after her fiancé dumped her for a fourteen-year-old girl and fled to Mexico.
6. My wife told me that victims of sexual assault commonly gain in excess of fifty to a hundred pounds because they don’t want men to get close to them. We had a neighbor at our condo who was pretty but seventy pounds overweight and owned three pit-bulls whom she spent all her time with. My wife speculated she was a victim of an assault.
7. Coming from divorced parents or parents living through an abusive marriage can make some children never want to get married. The statistics show that children of divorced parents have a 200 percent greater chance of getting divorced themselves.
Part Four. What forces in the environment “program” us in the deterministic sense to be more successful?
1. Having a family member with good social skills.
2. Having a family member with a strong work ethic.
3. Having a successful business nearby creates more traffic and more competition. For example, Starbucks makes other companies, such as Coffee Bean, more successful.
4. The New England Patriots are the Starbucks of football. A lot of men hate the Patriots because men hate that which threatens their power. But the powerful are effective role models.
5. Football was a garbage sport in the 1980s coached by rednecks with fat bellies. Not until Bill Walsh coached the 49ers in the late 1980s did all of football improve.
6. Being raised with diverse food at an early age gives you a more sophisticated palate. Take my wife and me. She grew up on green Jell-O and a cheese sandwiches. I grew up on authentic Mexican cooking in San Jose, California, then moved to Berkeley where I ate Thai, Indian, and other spicy cuisines. It was in my environment. It wasn’t in hers.
7. Determinism, obesity, and poverty: Poor people are fatter than middle class and rich people. There are many reasons for this, including the stress of poverty, which stimulates a “fat” hormone.
Part Five. Nihilism Is No Longer a “Choice” for Archie and Brother Leon
1. nihilism, the obliteration of right and wrong, losing any stakes in life, nothing is at stake anymore, beyond caring is the shortest definition, a sort of spiritual death where you wander the world not caring if you live or die or amount to anything. Death of a moral compass.
2. Anything Goes Morality or Moral relativism, make up your moral system depending on circumstances. Stealing, lying, cheating, and other immoral conduct can be rationalized under the right circumstances.
3. Populist Fallacy: Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Brother Leon presumably sees other teachers getting kickbacks, so he “joins the party.”
4. Slippery slope is when your rationalizations lead to nihilism.
5. In nihilism you reach the point where there are no rules so that “all is permitted” or “anything goes.”
6. Inconsolable, learned helplessness, a sense that everything is futile so the only thing left in life is to “get yours.” In America, we have the nihilistic saying, “I’ve got mine. Get yours.”
7. Point of No Return, like the cop who steals drugs 1,000 times.
8. “Despair is not knowing it,” Kierkegaard
9. empathy vs. self-pity, an eternal battle
10. numbness, which leads to sadism, a perverted form of power in which one derives pleasure from inflicting cruelty upon others.
Part Six. Review Some of the Thesis Approaches to the Essay
Sample Thesis #1
The novel's main characters' Archie, Brother Leon, and even Jerry show they are shackled to the chains of determinism evidenced by ____________________, _______________________, ______________________, and ________________________.
Sample Thesis #2
The Chocolate War is a burden to read. Why. Because it's too dark, weighed down by unrelenting nihilism evidenced by _____________________, _________________, ________________, and _____________________.
Sample Thesis #3
A psychological anaylsis of Archie Costello shows his spiritual link to Satan evidenced by his protracted loneliness and solipsism; his ruthless hunger for power; his emotional dependence on sadism as a substitute for human connection; his misanthropy and self-contempt; and his self-blinding pride.
Thesis #4
The Stanford Experiment and Trinity High subject people to the dehumanization process, which includes ___________________, __________________, ______________, _______________, and _____________________.
Thesis #5
The oppressive melancholy and depression that we experience from reading the novel comes in part from seeing Jerry suffer so many types of deaths. These deaths include ____________________, _________________, __________________, __________________, and ________________________.
Spiritual Death in the Novel
The Chocolate War is about the different types of deaths we face when we compromise our individual conscience for power, conformity, and corruption, as Jerry does throughout the novel. One type of death Jerry suffers is the death of the identity of himself that he values:
1. His image of self as being courageous is gone for he realizes he is a coward who is manipulated by Archie to fight, not out of courage, but by pressure to defend his “manhood” and by revenge.
2. His image as a compassionate man is gone as he sees he can be calloused and apathetic, a slave to the barbarian tribal code, as he participates in the final fight.
3. His image as a moral man is gone during the fight when he sees his dead mother casting an admonishing gaze upon him, showing that he has betrayed her, by betraying the values she taught him.
4. His image as being loyal to his mother is gone as he realizes pride and self-preservation triumphs over all other interests.
Thus the novel is dealing with the death of the self, in a spiritual or psychological sense, much more than it is dealing with physical death.
Part Three: Today’s Essay Variation:
Jerry is a complex character. He is neither simply heroic, worthy of our sympathy and admiration nor simply a “failure,” worthy of our scorn and contempt. Argue that Jerry’s moral complexities defy simple analysis with a thesis that might look like this:
Jerry is a sympathetic character full of moral contradictions that include ______________________, __________________, __________________, and _______________________________.
Some moral complexities of Jerry:
One. He sees the futility and mediocrity of his father’s spineless, complacent existence but fails to see that his father deals with his wife’s death by withdrawing.
Two. Jerry is wise to see the folly of becoming complacent to a life of conforming mediocrity like his father, but then he conforms to violence and the “man code” by participating in the fight at the end of the novel.
Three. Jerry is bold to defy the chocolate sale, Brother Leon and the Vigils, but one could argue that it’s not his free will that is doing the defiance, merely the depression from losing his mother. Less depressed, would he conform like everyone else?
Four. Jerry sees the malignancy that roils beneath Trinity High and the Vigils but he capitulates to the psychological warfare of Archie.
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