Because Back in the World is not available, I have give you your assignment based on the following online stories. No book is required:
Bullet in the Brain, Say Yes, and Powder on PDF.
McMahon Commentary You Can Use As a Source for Your Essay
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 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.
McMahon Commentary on 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.
Student Disagreement with McMahon
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.
Remember: When you write about literature, such as short stories and novels, you use the present verb tense.
“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.
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?
Common Lie: The Chimera
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.
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
7. The Bitch Goddess Fallacy
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. iPod
19. nything 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.
Other Chimeras
1. a panacea like a Fad diet
2. a rite of passage like a car representing freedom, independence, and sexual attraction.
3. 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.
4. the myth of romantic absolute, fueled by crappy love songs.
5. a childhood longing, like Christmas lights and Budweiser sign.
An A paragraph contains the following: Structurally, it contains a topic sentence, either explicit or implicit; it has supporting concrete details; its supporting details logically follow the other, which give the paragraph coherence; it contains transitions (avoid, if you can, elementary transitions such as first, second, third, and so on), which give the paragraph cohesiveness. Rhetorically speaking, an A paragraph should be written in a passionate, distinctive voice. The language should be precise, lively, and colorful, reflecting the writer’s passion for the subject.
A successful paragraph has the following:
1. topic sentence (mini thesis)
2. supporting details
3. unity: all the supporting details are relevant to the topic sentence
4. cohesiveness: all the supporting details logically follow the other with the help of transitions. Advanced writers attempt to use transitions other than the familiar “first . . . second . . . third . . . Finally”
5. concluding sentence (optional)
Sample A Paragraph Response
The innovation of the iPod and its marriage partner, iTunes, have seemingly created Listening Paradise for the music lover. Now you can have thousands of songs at your fingertips and customize your own playlists, make ratings, burn your own CDs and in essence believe that it's you--not the recording artists--who is the “creative genius” for all your music. But in fact, you will most likely face the sad truth that as you amass thousands upon thousands of songs, you will reach a point in which your ability to appreciate music will actually diminish, not deepen, because having tens of thousands of songs and hundreds of playlists will degrade your music listening pleasure. The first thing you’ll notice is that you won’t even remember what songs you have and the treasures that used to give you so much joy become buried under a pile of newer and newer songs that muddle your memory. The second thing that will happen is that in your determination to listen to as much of your music as possible, you will create huge playlists and the music will play all day and night as you multi-task at your computer so that you’re not really focusing on music the way you used to. Your relationship with music has changed drastically to the point that it is now a form of “wallpaper,” a droning in the distance that swaths you with a feeling of security. But whatever security you gain from cocooning yourself in your music, you will lose from becoming more and more self-conscious about what kind of songs you own because you’ll become aware that you live in a culture in which your identity is judged largely on your playlists and “brand identity” as determined by your music tastes will become more important than actually enjoying music. Finally, when you have hundreds and hundreds of playlists, you will suffer from “choice anxiety.” Fretting over what to play and always worrying that you’re neglecting a huge chunk of your music will become a distraction that compromises your music-listening experience. Thus we are a culture with the technology capable of fitting 40,000 songs on an iPod, but our brains cannot embrace that much music without suffering some kind of permanent meltdown.
Another Example of an A Paragraph
A paragraph that explains why Octo-Mom stirs the hostility of so many (transitions underlined) :
The California woman who relied on the dubious practices of a fertility doctor to give birth to 14 children, has become a national demon who stirs our most primitive fears and hostilities and compels us to gather our pitchforks and torches and to chase her from our midst. Her demonic reputation exists in part because she has become a metaphor for the malignant parasite whose ravenous, pathological appetite to bear bus loads of children with legal and government sanction stirs the general public’s greatest Malthusian nightmare: Paying the hefty tax tab to cater to the wild irresponsible desire of an emotionally-arrested woman whose sole passions in life are to bear more children than she can take care of and to liken her image to celebrity goddess Angelina Jolie. Her reputation as a monster is reinforced by her very title, Octo-Mom, which suggests a malevolent invader who bears similarities to the pod creatures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Finally, our resentment is vindicated when it is reported that she and her litter will live in luxury paid for by the generosity of others, thus making us feel like it is the grossly irresponsible in this world who are rewarded while the rest of us who play by the rules having nothing to look forward to in this life except for getting punked.
Know the Steps to Writing the Research Paper
Very good link gives students a research paper checklist, so to speak.
Here's an "official checklist."
Jeff McMahon Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.