Wednesday 21 January 2009

Where do Sam and Eric fit in? (+ essay notes)

I'm busy writing my second body paragraph, but as I was doing that, I realised a funny thing that I had never spotted when I read Lord of the Flies before. Between chapters 1 and 2, Golding seems to have changed his mind about which group of boys the twins Sam and Eric belong to.

This is not finished. It's just a note to remind me to come back and complete it later, I'll get back to the essay now. 

It's 9:37 PM now, and I've decided, after two hours solid work, that I can't finish my essay about Sam and Eric tonight. But I can finish this post. 

When I thought about it more, and what happens in the rest of the novel, it's clear that Sam and Eric are not part of Jack's choir group, as chapter 1 makes clear. The confusion is that in chapter 2, Jack says that he and his hunters will look after the fire, and Jack immediately issues orders as to which groups in the choir will be responsible: "Altos, you can keep the fire going this week, and trebles the next - " (p. 43). When the twins reappear in chapter 3, their duty is clearly to tend the fire, as it is later in the book, even though they are not a part of Jack's group. Perhaps Golding didn't notice this either. He certainly doesn't explain it. 

References
Golding, W., and Epstein, E. L. (1954). Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee.  

_________________ 

Since I'm not going to finish my own essay this evening, I'll post the notes so far that I've been making as I'm writing. 

notes

  1. First body paragraph written before.
    Started essay at 7:55 PM, after some organizing of ideas for 2nd, and more important, body paragraph. It took me a while to get something clear and strong enough to be a main idea in a topic sentence for another body paragraph. Some other things I thought of and threw out were: cheerful, helpful, intimidated, etc. These were either did not seem important enough, or when I thought about supporting them, I decided they were wrong and could not be supported. I think I spent about twenty minutes just thinking and revising my topic sentence before I was happy with the main idea that I could support.
    Then I had to find the supporting details and organize them into a unified paragraph.
    And then write the paragraph. Which took me until 9:32 PM = more than 1½  hours!
    There was a lot of research, and it took me ten minutes searching on the internet for a reliable source to support my claim that many people believe the twins represent society.

  2. In my second body paragraph, I make statements about what does not appear in chapters one and two, and that meant I had to quickly skim through those 40 pages again to make sure that Sam and Eric’s names were not there. And then I noticed a funny thing – Golding seems to have changed his mind between chapters 1 and 2 about whether the twins were in the choir or not. I think I’ll blog on hat – it’s an interesting detail that I hadn’t noticed before, and would not have thought of now if I weren’t looking at the details very closely to support my main ideas for an essay.

  3. Still have to write the introduction and conclusion. It’s 9:35 PM, and after staying up to watch Obama’s inauguration last night, I think I should go to bed and finish this tomorrow. What a bad example for my students! 

4 comments:

  1. 4. Thursday, 5:21 AM – resume work before class.
    5:44 – finished introduction. Thinking of a good opener took a few minutes. I’m glad I slept on it. I don’t think I could have thought of anything so neat as Milgram’s psychology experiments last night when I was tired. Maybe my brain kept working on it as I slept. I’m happy with the introduction. Other than thinking of an opener, the rest was fairly easy to write. I hadn’t written it until now, but I had already written both body paragraphs, so I knew what the thesis statement had to say. It just needed an opener and then a link between the opener and the thesis statement. Just the conclusion to go.
    AUA’s library used to have a copy of Milgram’s book. I guess it’s probably still there. It makes for disturbing reading, as does the novel.


    5. Thursday, 22 January 2009, 19:25 – slightly revised thesis statement to make it clearer. Also a little shorter. Corrected and then revised an error in the linking sentence of my introduction. = 6 minutes.
    On review, I decided that Soojin and Tuk’s comment that my thesis statement was unclear was justified. I quite liked that part of the earlier version, but the use of the word character with two different meanings in a single sentence was confusing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. But it's fun, and I often change my mind, or at least clarify my ideas, when I sit down and actually write an essay that supports a thesis.
    Maybe it's not everyone's idea of fun, but some people do enjoy it.

    ReplyDelete

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