Supporting Your Essay with Summary, Paraphrase, and Direct Quotations (adapted from The Structure of Argument by Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Haisty Winchell)
Summary is a shortened version of the original text in your own words.
According to Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau, authors of From Critical Thinking to Argument, “When you summarize, you are standing back, saying very briefly what the whole adds up to; you are seeing the forest, not the individual trees.”
Example: Last paragraph from Tobias Wolff’s “Firelight”
“I watch the fire, watch the changing light on the faces of my family. I try to feel at home, and I do, almost entirely. This is the moment I dream of when I am far away; this is my dream of home. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it will somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.”
One-sentence Summary
The narrator can never completely feel at ease with the coziness and security of his family because life as taught him, in the form of the firelight metaphor, that those things that lull us into the greatest sense of security tend to be the very things that trick us.
Paraphrase
In contrast, they write, “When you paraphrase, you are inching through the forest, scrutinizing each tree—that is, finding a synonym for almost every word in the original, in an effort to make sure that you know exactly what you are dealing with.”
“I watch the fire, watch the changing light on the faces of my family. I try to feel at home, and I do, almost entirely. This is the moment I dream of when I am far away; this is my dream of home. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it will somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.”
Paraphrasing the above text:
When the narrator finds himself hypnotized by the fire, he studies the transitory images of his family’s faces, which speaks to the fleeting, not permanent, nature of those things he longs to give him security. We further see that these cozy firelight moments lull him into a dream of contradiction: On one hand, he is close to his family; on the other hand, he is transported away from them in a dream. He finds himself frustrated, we further read, because in these moments he wants to wallow in a sense of family togetherness, but he holds back as if this moment is not real, but some phantom that has come to make him a fool. We further read that the narrator has this intractable terror that if he becomes complacent and surrenders completely to his family warmth and security, that complete surrender will leave him vulnerable to having him lose the very thing he loves most. This fear is so acute, it propels him out of his dream and into an almost violent paroxysm.
When you paraphrase, as in the above example, you are taking a fine-tooth comb and lingering over every word in order to interpret a difficult text to your reader.
Summary is different.
Summary is about giving your reader a long-distance snapshot and this has different purposes. This long-distance snapshot is about giving your reader more general themes of the story as opposed to exploring the complexities of a character’s inner world as was shown in the above paraphrase.
Why You Summarize
You must summarize before you can evaluate a text. Your evaluation is based on an accurate summary and consists of the following:
Providing reader with general themes
Presenting another’s view
Responding to that view
Agreeing in part
Disagreeing in part
Correcting factual mistakes
Refining another’s argument
Explaining contrasting views and adding your position
Summary is the most difficult because you’re taking long and complex texts and reducing them to their essential meaning. To do this well makes your essay convincing and gives you credibility with your readers. If you summarize inaccurately, your essay collapses from the very beginning.
The Bad News: A Lot of Students Write Inaccurate Summaries
I’ve had students use character misspellings in their summaries.
I’ve had students use names of characters that are not even in the stories.
I’ve had students refer to female characters as male and vice versa.
I’ve had students give me contradictory and inaccurate plot points.
I’ve had students summarize narratives from the wrong stories.
I’ve had students misspell the story title in their summaries.
The Good News: The Above Students Didn’t Read the Assignment
If you read the assigned texts and reread them, you’ll have a much better chance of avoiding the above mistakes. Sounds obvious, but then again here I am telling you a lot of students try to generate essays without doing the assigned reading.
How Do You Summarize?
You Begin with Critical Reading
To read critically, you have to do the following:
One. Comprehend the author's purpose and meaning, which is expressed in the claim or thesis.
Two. Examine the evidence, if any, that is used.
Three. Find emotional appeals, if any, that are used.
Four. Identify analogies and comparisons and analyze their legitimacy.
Five. Look at the topic sentences to see how the author is building his or her claim.
Six. Look for the appeals the author uses be they logic (logos), emotions (pathos), or authority (ethos).
Seven. Is the author's argument diminished by logical fallacies?
Eight. Do you recognize any bias in the essay that diminishes the author's argument?
Nine. Do we bring any prejudice that may compromise our ability to evaluate the argument fairly?
Example
Finding Main Point for Our Summary of an Essay--"Amazon Is Not a Monopoly" by Annie Lowry
Franklin Foer has an interesting new essay at New Republic arguing that Amazon is a monopoly trampling the public good and necessitating a vigorous public response, à la Ma Bell or U.S. Steel before it. There’s just one problem with his argument: Amazon is not a monopoly.
Foer starts off with a compelling insight: that monopolies act differently in the digital age. They do not corner a market and then start raising prices, to the detriment of the consumer. (Nobody expects that Google will start charging for searches, for instance.) Rather, they corner a market and put a vice on their suppliers.
“In its pursuit of bigness, Amazon has left a trail of destruction – competitors undercut, suppliers squeezed – some of it necessary, and some of it highly worrisome,” Foer writes. “In its confrontation with the publisher Hachette, it has entered a phase of heightened aggression.”
Amazon is a fearsome competitor forcing other retailers to compete or die, to be sure. It also might be a bad actor, and its harassment of Hachette might necessitate a legal, regulatory, or even legislative response. But it is hard to see how it is a monopoly.
To demonstrate that it is, Foer cites its dominance of the market for hardcover, softcover, and e-books:
A recent survey conducted by the Codex Group, released in March, found that Amazon commands a 67 percent share of the e-books market (not at all surprising given that it invented a wildly popular device for consuming digital tomes). And when it comes to the sale of all new books – hard, soft, and electronic – Amazon accounts for 41 percent. Even though the five major publishing houses have political connections and economic power of their own, they just can’t compete.
Amazon does have something like a monopoly over the books market, and that monopoly has become harmful, as evidenced by its deplorable treatment of Hachette. But this is cherry-picking. Books are Amazon’s oldest business, and the one where it controls the biggest market share.
Foer argues not just that Amazon has a monopoly over book-selling, but a monopoly writ large. The evidence for this is thin. Amazon is surely the biggest player in e-commerce, with about $75 billion in revenue last year. But that comes out of a $263 billion market, and the National Retail Federation estimates that Amazon makes up only about 15 percent of total e-commerce sales. Of late, it has started to face more serious competition from the big brick-and-mortar chains, which have the capital to compete with Amazon on price and service. Walmart’s e-commerce sales are growing about as fast as Amazon’s, for instance. It is also facing more competition from technology companies, most notably Google.
Moreover, Amazon faces fierce competition from traditional retailers, taking but a tiny slice of the $4.5 trillion overall retail pie. Amazon is about the same size as Target, sales-wise, and a little smaller than Kroger. All three get dwarfed by Walmart, which generated about half a trillion in revenue last year. And in strategic areas where Amazon has set its sights on growth — like same-day delivery and cloud computing — the company also faces fierce competition from well-funded rivals, as my colleague Kevin Roose has noted.
Foer waives this competitive pressure away, arguing that Amazon has done nothing but eat its rivals. “It has a record of shredding young businesses, like Zappos and Diapers.com, just as they begin to pose a competitive challenge,” he writes. “It uses its riches to undercut opponents on price – Amazon was prepared to lose $100 million in three months in its quest to harm Diapers.com – then once it has exhausted the resources of its foes, it buys them and walks away even stronger.”
But what Foer is describing is not the nefarious actions of a monopolist but the normal actions of a big, well-funded firm in a spirited market. Businesses compete. Very often the bigger one wins. Foer argues, however, that Amazon’s “big-footing necessitates a government response,” without really explaining why.
Who is losing when Amazon is winning? Does the government really need to step in to protect Amazon’s rivals, provided that the market remains a market? Why is it wrong for Amazon to demand more and more from its suppliers? Is there any evidence that Amazon controls other markets like it controls the books market? All this is unclear.
At the same time, Foer underplays how good these modern business behemoths are for the consumer, unlike the Ma Bells and U.S. Steels of yore. He describes us all as complicit in … something. I’m not sure what: “We’ve all been seduced by the deep discounts, the monthly automatic diaper delivery, the free Prime movies, the gift wrapping, the free two-day shipping, the ability to buy shoes or books or pinto beans or a toilet all from the same place,” he writes. “But it has gone beyond seduction, really. We expect these kinds of conveniences now, as if they were birthrights.”
Is that really such a bad thing? Amazon relentlessly drives down prices for goods and services and delivers them fast and cheap. It plows its profits into price cuts and innovation rather than putting them in the hands of its investors. That benefits millions of families — full stop. In the artful phrasing of Matthew Yglesias, it seems like “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.”
None of this is to say that Amazon should not face new regulations to force it to treat its workers better. None of this is to say that Amazon could not become a monopoly by pushing out or buying up more of its e-commerce rivals. None of this is to say that its harassment of Hachette is right or should be legal or should not face some serious pushback from the government and consumers. None of this is to say, either, that our legal framework should not view seemingly benign monopolies, like Google, with anything other than skepticism.
But Amazon being a shitty, vicious competitor and Amazon being a monopoly are hardly the same thing.
What is the most accurate summary of Lowry's essay? Choose the best answer:
One. Amazon’s unfair and often brutal labor practices necessitate government regulation.
Two. Because Walmart is crushing Amazon, it has no choice but to resort to more ruthless practices.
Three. While Lowry agrees with Franklin Foer that Amazon is “fearsome” and at times a “bad actor,” she rejects his claim that Amazon is a monopoly.
Four. Amazon’s commitment to driving down prices is good for consumers.
Five. Amazon's unfair labor treatment compels us to boycott it.
Direct Quotations
When the text you're evaluating has a passage that is so perfect that you want to present it as it is, then you use a direct quotation. For fiction, the passage might have the perfect pitch. For an argument, the nonfiction piece might provide succinct, irrefutable evidence for a claim you wish to support.
The Analysis Rule for Direct Quotations
However long the quotation, your analysis of that quotation must be equal to or greater than the quoted passage. Otherwise, you're in danger of writing an aggregate of quoted and paraphrased material absent your writing voice.
Use Signal Phrase Verbs When You Provide Direct Quotations
argues
asks
asserts
concludes
continues
counters
declares
explains
implores
insists
observes
posits
proclaims
questions
replies
responds
states
suggests
Signal Phrase Templates
In the words of author and essayist Samuel Johnson, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
As Divakaruni has noted, “Looking down from the heights of Maslow's pyramid, it seems inconceivable to us that someone could actually prefer bread to freedom.”
Arthur Hardy, a renowned expert on New Orleans Carnival traditions, points out that “Mardi Gras came to North America from Paris, where it had been celebrated since the Middle Ages.”
Racial profiling “makes a mockery of the rights to which people in this country are entitled,” claims columnist Colbert I. King.
Sir Winston Churchill offers this wise advice: "If you are going through hell, keep going."
Sheffield answers her critics by conceding, “The proposal did not account sufficiently for the economic downturn.”
Book Review of Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins That Focuses on the Characters' Lies
Using Life’s Mundane Clay to Mold a Fantasy of Life
Tobias Wolff’s characters are compulsive storytellers and liars; they are constantly spinning their own lives into melodramas, inventing or embellishing personas, daydreaming themselves into fantasy worlds, or turning their pasts into confessional anecdotes. Some embroider the truth to try to make themselves seem more interesting. Some lie out of self-delusion. Some invent phony identities so that they can cheat strangers out of money. Some fantasize as an escape from the banality of their lives. In Mr. Wolff’s hands their storytelling becomes a metaphor both for people’s need to make narrative order out of the chaos of daily existence and for the fiction-making process he practices himself.
A boy compulsively makes up stories, telling people his perfectly healthy mother has been coughing up blood or that he is the son of missionaries and was born and raised in Tibet (“The Liar”). A fast-talking con man hitches a ride with two brothers and tries to sell them shares in a gold mine in Peru (“The Rich Brother”). A professor tells one of her students a long “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”-like story about how she sold out friends to interrogators in Prague many decades ago (“A Mature Student”). A man leads “another submerged life, parallel to the one known by those around him” — a what-if life in which he did not leave his hometown for California, but ended up with the girl he was passionately in love with in high school.
This collection of old and new tales — “Our Story Begins” — reminds us that Mr. Wolff’s own storytelling leans toward the traditional school of yarn spinning. There is something distinctly old-fashioned about many of these stories. The language his characters often employ has a dated, old-timey feel — they use phrases like “shockeroo,” “going out of my tree,” “gone with the wind” — and the narratives themselves tend to have tidy beginnings, middles and O. Henry-esque endings complete with deliberately ironic twists. These are stories in which the reader is drawn in by a quirky or intriguing premise and propelled along by the glittering little emotional and physical details that Mr. Wolff likes to scatter like bread crumbs throughout his narrative. His prose is so lively and engaging that the reader often notices the contrived nature of the stories only in retrospect.
In “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” an aging professor who has tried to husband her career by never taking a controversial position finds herself the butt of a false job offer and reacts by giving a shocking lecture about Indians hunting “people down with clubs and arrows and spears and nets.” In “The Chain” a man named Gold has to repay a friend for doing him a favor — killing the dog that attacked Gold’s daughter — and finds himself setting off a chain of unintended and tragic consequences. And in “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” a family’s car breaks down at a small garage in the middle of nowhere, and when the husband, hitchhiking to the nearest town, is picked up by a film crew, he contemplates abandoning his wife and son in the desert to pursue a career in the movies.
As readers of Mr. Wolff’s earlier books well know, his characters tend to be deadbeats, misfits, outcasts — the hapless, the disappointed, the lost and the obnoxious. They know that their dreams — of making it in Hollywood or ending up with their fantasy girl — are out of reach. Or they feel filled with anger and self-loathing because they’re fat or unlucky or embarrassed about their lack of means or meager prospects. They spend too much time thinking about themselves and pondering things like whether it’s better to live dangerously and go out with a bang or live timidly and go out with a whimper.
A chubby loser who shoots one of his taunting friends while they are out hunting, a spiritual seeker who’s piled up massive debts and gotten himself kicked out of a religious community, a bitter soldier who joined the army to punish his mother for marrying one of his high school teachers, an envious sad sack who covets his best friend’s girlfriend, a sucker who befriends a pickpocket and predictably loses his wallet — these are representative of the sort of unfortunate people Mr. Wolff likes to focus on.
In the lesser stories these folks are simply tiresome and depressing — characters toward whom Mr. Wolff assumes an air of weary condescension. In the stronger stories, however, as in his powerful 1989 memoir “This Boy’s Life,” he demonstrates his ability to write about misfortune and survival with a winning combination of sympathy and humor, depicting both his characters’ recognition of the abyss — “where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best” — and their dogged determination somehow to navigate around this gaping chasm as best they can.
The 10 Types of Lies in Tobias Wolff’s Fiction
One. Chimera, chasing an illusion in the form of an obsession: “Firelight” is about the chimera of being cozy, secure, and safe. It's an ideal of the boy's imagination.
Two. Day-dreaming a fantasy world (usually we are the "star" of the "movie") as an escape from banality or a defeated self: “Desert Breakdown,” “Firelight”
Three. Self-delusion to the point of being blind of one’s own hypocrisy and other contradictions: “A White Bible,” “The Deposition”
Four. Inflated grandiosity and egotism as a mask to hide the perpetual adolescent or dysfunctional child: “The Rich Brother,” “Desert Breakdown,” “Mortals,” “The Chain,” “The Deposition,” “Say Yes”
Five. Becoming numb to one’s personal hell so as to be in denial: “Say Yes”
Six. Reshaping the past to suit one’s needs: “The Rich Brother,” “The Deposition,” “Deep Kiss,” “Nightingale”
Seven. Rationalizing a bad decision: “Desert Breakdown,” “Nightingale,” “The Other Miller”
Eight. Exaggerated sense of suffering, self-pity, and victimization, which is the flip side of grandiosity. This is evident in "The Rich Brother," "The Chain," and "Desert Breakdown."
Nine. False belief that a scapegoat is responsible for our problems when in fact our problems are self-induced. This is evident in "The Rich Brother," "Desert Breakdown," and "The Other Miller."
Ten. Believing our morality is absolute when in fact it’s relative: “The Deposition,” “Nightingale” (consider the imaginary wallet experiment of $500 and a million dollars)
Using a Quotation as an Introduction to Your Essay
Michiko Kakutani, in a praising review of Our Story Begins, starts by focusing on how lies are the most salient feature of Wolff's fiction:
Tobias Wolff's characters are compulsive storytellers and liars; they are constantly spinning their own lives into melodramas, inventing or embellishing personas, daydreaming themselves into fantasy worlds, or turning their pasts into confessional anecdotes. Some embroider the truth to try to make themselves seem more interesting. Some lie out of self-delusion. Some invent phony identities so that they can cheat strangers out of money. Some fantasize as an escape from the banality of their lives. In Mr. Wolff’s hands their storytelling becomes a metaphor both for people’s need to make narrative order out of the chaos of daily existence and for the fiction-making process he practices himself.
These self-delusions and "phony identities" point to a larger pathology evident in Wolff's fiction, solipsism, the turning away from the world and retreat into the self. A close study of Wolff's fiction reveals the underlying causes of solipsism, which include _______________, ________________, _______________, and _______________.
What kind of claim has been stated above?
Another Introduction: Framing the Debate
One camp of readers claims that the lies, half-truths, self-delusions, and “phony identities” are so acute in Wolff’s fiction that the characters are incapable of redemption and forever trapped in emotional adolescence and dysfunction. However, another camp claims that while there is indeed a pathology of lies and self-deceit that informs Wolff’s self-destructive characters, there are moments, however imperfect, of redemption. While this redemption is far from perfect and often less than satisfactory, there are indeed moments of redemption that grace Wolff’s characters evidenced by _____________, __________________, _________________, and _____________________.
Another form of introduction is to begin with a general statement of the theme and work toward a more specific thesis about the text you're analyzing.
Like the characters in Tobias Wolff’s fiction, we tell false or embellished narratives about ourselves to compensate for desires and basic needs that too often can’t be fulfilled in the real world. These basic needs include finding a home and creating a sense of belonging; finding recognition and high esteem of others; finding connection through friendships and a loving partner; finding authenticity in a world of smoke and mirrors; finding the satisfactions of artistic creation; finding vindication from the people who castigate us for our dreams and aspirations; finding escape from our banal existence by chasing scintillating chimeras.
The false narratives seduce us and become the “lies” that direct our lives. These lies medicate us from the insufferable banality and frustration of our lonely, boring existence. But this medicine when taken in large doses too often becomes our poison, resulting in delusions, narcissism, stubborn bull-headed ignorance and refusal to change our bad behaviors; and seduction into the false comforts of complacent mediocrity.
It is precisely this poison that ruins the lives of Wolff's characters and makes any kind of redemption impossible evidenced by ____________, ____________, _____________, and _______________.
Prewriting Exercise: Exploring a Debate:
Redemption Vs. Nihilism in Tobias Wolff’s stories
While some characters are delivered from their delusions and see with crystal clear eyes the devastating truth that defines their lives, such as the wife in “Say Yes,” most of Tobias Wolff’s characters do not embark upon a redemptive journey but are mired in nihilism evidenced by their bullheaded ignorance, their indelible pride, their ongoing cycle of futility and learned helplessness, and their intractable enthrallment to the fool’s errands born from the pursuit of the chimera.
Disagreement with the above:
McMahon would have us believe that the flaws in Tobias Wolff’s characters are too egregious to qualify them for redemption, but McMahon is in error, for the very nature of redemption is built on the idea that we, the human race, rise from the infinite depths of our collapsed lives and indeed the characters in “Say Yes,” “Bullet in the Brain,” and “Firelight” evidence ruined lives washed upon the shores of misery and despair.
But if McMahon would give the stories a more careful reading he perhaps would no longer be blind to the possibility of redemption for the stories’ characters. Let us for example take that incorrigible racist of a husband in “Say Yes.” The fact that his wife sees his bullying and prejudice in a new light suggests that she may be able to offer the husband an ultimatum: Change your racist ways, you fool, or we can terminate this marriage. The story’s open-ended conclusion leaves possibility for such a scenario. Then there’s “Bullet in the Brain.” Anders is a shrill, prideful buffoon, to be sure, but the ache of his memories that flood his consciousness just before his death suggest a man who sees the errors of his ways and seeing these errors paves the way for redemption, however short our life may be. “Firelight” too offers redemption in the boy who grows up to be a man, a husband, and a father. His doubts about the firelight that hypnotizes him show he is a man of caution who never lets the flickering flames that represent cozy domesticity lull him into complacency. In many ways, the grown man is the perfect picture of redemption, someone who has matured and keeps looking over his back to make sure he doesn’t lapse into false comfort and stagnation in order that he can provide the guidance and love his children need.
So while McMahon is so supremely confident about the presumed despair in Wolff’s stories, I reject my instructor’s nihilistic vision in order to see the broader, more redemptive dimensions of Wolff’s masterful stories.
Key Passages from “Firelight”
Improving their lot in life, the mother tells her son, “We were definitely getting out of there. To show me and maybe herself that she meant business, she went through the paper during breakfast every Saturday morning and circled the advertisements for furnished apartments that sounded, as she put, ‘right for our needs.’ I liked that expression. It made me feel as if our needs had some weight in the world, and would have to be reckoned with.”
We further read that the mother teaches her son how to shop with conviction: “You can’t be squeamish. You have to be free of shame, absolutely sure of your right to look at what you cannot buy.”
We see a form of lying, assuming a pose of conviction, the belief that you are someone in this world to “be reckoned with.” The boy learns early that this pose of conviction is a façade.
He further learns that his mother shuns substance over illusion, especially when the substance is dull and boring. She didn’t marry Dutch, the All-American from Yale, who would have set her up financially because he was too boring. Life wouldn’t have been worth living.
But the boy wants the ideal life that money can buy. What he wants is coziness and security, two things his mother shows contempt for. She’s confident enough in her moxie and conviction.
Well studied in facades and phony displays of conviction, the boy is taken aback by Dr. Avery, the bovine professor who is compared to a “buffalo in the broadness and solemnity of his face.”
The boy’s “eyes went straight to the flames.” Clearly, the flames in the fireplace are a metaphor for cozy belonging, home, and security. But they also burn out. They are volatile, seductive, alluring, and hypnotic. They seduce us into false security. That indeed is “The Firelight.” False security is a type of lying: We tell ourselves that we are in the real and that everything is okay when in fact we’re fooling ourselves.
Dr. Avery and his wife put on a façade of being a loving couple, but the boy sees this as “stagecraft,” trying too hard in public to impress others with their love.
“I watch the fire, watch the changing light on the faces of my family. I try to feel at home, and I do, almost entirely. This is the moment I dream of when I am far away; this is my dream of home. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it will somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.”
He remains ambivalent about the power of the firelight, a force of illusion and seduction, and a center of family belonging and security.
“Firelight” Study Questions
One. What is the narrator trying to escape from?
The transitory smells of despair, people who smell of despair, people who cultivate unsavory smells and live in boardinghouses, a notch above squatters.
A sense of insignificance haunts him; he wants to be someone to “be reckoned with,” not some nonentity.
Two. What theater or game does Mother play for her son?
There is a theater of looking for a nice home because she can’t afford one, but she can afford to entertain her son with hope.
This theater energizes both mother and son; they feed off “the pleasure to be found in the purchase of goods and services.”
Buying offers the promise of rebirth and reinvention, identity, and becoming a “member of the club.”
His mother was “free of shame”; shopping was something she could do with conviction and rectitude.
There is a dignity in her mien and demeanor.
His mother, a former model, knows how to strike a pose, to play a part, to act a role. Oscar Wilde says the pose is life’s most important lesson.
I’m not that good at the pose because I’m anxious. I tend to lose my poker cards because of my high anxieties.
Life is knowing which poker cards to hide and which ones to show.
Nervous people don’t play the poker game well. When someone loses all his poker cards, we have a saying in America: “He **** the bed.’
Beneath the mother’s calm demeanor are demons evidenced by her outbursts: “You don’t ever let yourself go like that . . .”
Three. “I would be rich now, and have a collie.” Explain how these words inform the stories theme.
We’re dealing with issues of class, wealth, ideals, and the chimera of the perfect life, Hakuna Matata. This is the boy's chimera or illusion.
We’re dealing with “pure stagecraft,” what married couples do to show their affection to others.
Even though Dr. Avery appears to be in a dysfunctional, symbiotic relationship, his castigation of the university appears, ironically, to inform the story’s theme: Everything is “hollow” and “humbug” and a “movie set.”
Four. Explain the manner in which the narrator is seduced by the flames.
He grows sleepy and imagines being part of a stable family. He is looking for a home, one of the five motifs:
Finding a home
Engaging in a battle with an adversary or an antagonist
Embarking on a journey quest (to find authenticity, a grail, transcendence, redemption, self-reinvention, etc.)
Enduring suffering (a sort of purification rite and catharsis and redemption )
Obsession resulting in consummation (often death)
It’s ironic that the narrator doesn’t want to leave this “home” when in fact Dr. Avery’s abode is a movie set, a transitory abode for a misfit professor who doesn’t fit in socially with his colleagues.
Five. Why does the narrator create a story in his head regarding Dr. Avery, his wife, and daughter?
Creating stories makes us feel connected and intimate with others. These narratives give us an illusion of cohesiveness, logic, and control in a universe that is absurd, chaotic, and uncontrollable.
Six. Explain the story’s final paragraph in which the narrator, now grown, stares at the fire in his own house, feels both “at home” and “far away” and then is “in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it [the dream of being far away in presumably a pleasurable world] will somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.
We need to have our dreams, our parallel lives, to give nourishment and color and hope to our present life.
Is this a lie we tell ourselves?
"Deep Kiss" and the Theme of the Alternate Reality
Most of us create an alternate reality or parallel universe as a counterbalance to our mundane reality because we are looking for grand moments that never come. Often we create these grand moments out of an idealized past. I say idealized because we make the past more than it was.
The past becomes a myth and in this sense the past becomes a chimera, a fantasy world that can destroy us in part by not allowing us to live in the present.
The Chimera’s Definition, Causes and Effects
1. The chimera is a mirage that draws us in slowly, starting with a burp or a trifle, a tease, an iridescent color that flashes before our eyes or it hits us over the head. In either case, it grows into an obsession and consumes all our energies, thoughts, and dreams.
2. The chimera is based on unconscious longings for class ascent, acceptance, love, popularity, wealth, parental unconditional love (Rosebud), the Chanel Number Five Moment, distinction, proving our doubters that they were wrong.
3. We project our fantasy onto a tabula rasa or a blank slate.
4. Often the chimera is a panacea, a cure-all for all our woes.
5. The Absolute Fallacy (success, fitness, perfection, perfect absolute relationship)
6. The Transcendence Fallacy (If only I have this, I'll be able to overcome that)
7. The Comfort Fallacy (If I can eliminate all struggle and stress from my life, I'll find happiness)
8. The inevitable despair of the chimera. George Bernard Shaw said there are two great tragedies in life: Not getting what we want and getting it.
9. The cycle of ongoing chimeras, people who never learn and who go in circles, jumping from one chimera to the next.
10. The paradox of the chimera: Chimeras destroy us but they also feed our dreams and in some ways give us strength, drive, motivation, and vitality that we otherwise wouldn’t have.
11. The need for the chimera: We must have stars in the horizon for which he can row our oars.
Examples of chimera (have students come up with some):
1. The low-carb diet or the South Beach Diet
2. Yoga
3. A Lexus IS350
4. Viagra
5. Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft
6. Dianobol
7. Having a six-pack
8. Cosmetic surgery, botox or nose job or implants.
9. G-Star Jeans (underground store for special jeans, not the ones you can buy at Nordstrom)
10. the cognoscenti.
11. Becoming famous
12. Angelina Jolie; she’s more than a human. She’s become the great bitch goddess, every man’s dream and every woman’s nightmare. The fantasy of the seductress.
13. Jennifer Aniston, the myth of the good girl, the myth of innocence.
14. Celebrity of all kinds, an autograph, a sighting.
15. Las Vegas
16. Palos Verdes (my neighbors in Torrance are bitter that they haven’t moved to PV yet. Peevers.
17. UCLA
18. Apple
19. Anything sold on the QVC network
20. Marriage. Not all marriages but most are built on the Goody Box chimera. When I want a goody I reach into the goody box. But what happens when all the goodies run out.
21. Me-Time. People who have lots of me-time are miserable.
22. a panacea like a Fad diet
23. a rite of passage like a car representing freedom, independence, and sexual attraction.
24. a form of medication for depression or some deeply acute problem that you bandage with a simple solution; you buy a wardrobe to cover a restlessness and anxiety that haunts you.
25. the myth of romantic absolute, fueled by crappy love songs.
26. a childhood longing or memory, like Christmas lights and Budweiser sign.
A White Bible Study Questions
One. What do we learn about Maureen in the first paragraph?
She left her gloves in the club (forgetful because of alcohol?) and doesn’t want to go back to the club to get her gloves (which would dash “all her good intentions” of not drinking?). Is Maureen an alcoholic? Later on she fumbles her car keys, which fall to the ground. She appears inebriated. Later, her abductor can smell alcohol on her. “You’ve been using alcohol,” he says.
Then we see she’s walking in the wrong direction in paragraph 2. It appears she’s drunk and disoriented. She appears to drink to escape her stressful teaching job, being a single divorcée, and suffering the friction between her and her daughter (living with Maureen’s former colleague in a major school scandal) and the strain of having an unhealthy mother.
Maureen had delivered some “home truths” to her daughter Katie and now they are estranged.
Two. Is Maureen in denial of her alcoholism?
Apparently she needs some “home truths” that she loves to dish out to others because she tells her abductor, a student’s father, that she “was having a drink with friends.”
But her abductor says with mocking admonishment: “A drink? You stink of it. The great lady teacher!”
In fact her berates her over and over for telling a lie.
Her denial of her alcoholism is a lie, to be sure. But alcoholics, like all addicts, live under layer upon layer of lies.
One common lie is their delusion that they have control of their life.
Three. What lie is Hassan’s father living?
That his son, a mediocrity, a sloth, and a ne’er-do-well, can be a doctor and that Maureen is at fault for Hassan’s failure.
Another lie is the father’s pathetic delusion that he can preach piety (religious goodness) to Maureen while violating the law, abducting her! (“Without God, there is no foundation . . .”)
A lot of people call themselves religious but their lives contradict their assertion.
I’m reminded of my Vietnamese student, an atheist with five brothers and sisters, all rich Christians, and how their mother in Vietnam was dying of cancer. Only one child flew from the United States to care for the dying mother. It was my student.
Four. What does the white Bible represent in the story?
It is the promise, the false promise, the chimera, of truth and reliability and infallibility.
Clearly, a Bible represents truth but the story is full of people who tell lies and suffer delusions.
SF Gate Review of Wolff's Collection Explains the role of lies and gives brief commentary of the story.
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