- While Caroline is in the tower she experiences many moments of terror. Select the four sentences in the text which you feel are most effective in creating terror. Discuss your findings with one other student.
- Analyze Caroline’s relationship with her husband. Imagine that you are a marriage counsellor; what advice would you give Caroline? her husband? Write a letter to one or the other of these two people suggesting how they might improve their relationship in some way that might make it more fulfilling for both. Assume that Caroline did not visit the tower.
- Reread the descriptions of the paintings of Giovanna di Ferramano and the Unknown Gentleman. Explain how what we learn from these descriptions and the description of the tower at the beginning of the story help to shape our understanding of what happens to Caroline in the tower.
- The art of writing a suspenseful story depends on knowing now only how much information to give the reader and where and when to give it, but also on how much to withhold. With these considerations in mind, and referring to two specific passages, evaluate Laski’s success as a writer of suspenseful stories.
Personal Response
Respond to this story in your journal in any way you wish. You may want to take some of the following suggestions into consideration. Describe how you felt when you read the last paragraph of this story. Does this story remind you of any other stories you know or any dreams you may have had? Describe them. Explain what these stories and/or dreams have in common. Describe your first exposure to a horror story. How would you rate your response to horror on a scale of one to ten, ten being severe? Explain how you feel when you are experiencing horror and describe any effects or incidents that are particularly scary for you. Share your ideas with other students.
Language
Combine the following groups of sentences by using “ing†words, conjunctions, parallel structure, or any other devices you wish.
-
- Caroline spoke aloud
- She spoke with explosive relief.
- She stopped abruptly.
- The steps stopped too.
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- She looked down.
- She looked in the shaft of the tower.
- She looked down to the narrow staircase.
- The stair case was unprotected.
- It was spiralling round and round.
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- The skin of her right hand was torn.
- The skin was hot with blood.
- She would never lift her hand from the wall.
- She would force her rigid legs to move.
“The Sea Devil” by Arthur Gordon (United States)
There is a striking parallel between “The Sea Devil” and the plot of Everyman, a medieval morality play. Everyman’s action begins in heaven: God, looking at mankind’s sinfulness, summons Death, his mighty messenger, to call Everyman to a general reckoning. Everyman searches high and low for something to stand by him in his hour of need and finds only his own Good Deeds. Good Deeds, and her sister, Knowledge, instruct Everyman in the right way to behave. Thus, at the eleventh hour, Everyman is saved.
“The Sea Devil” is a secular morality tale based on a similar structure: it is a retributive, although uncaring, Nature whom this modern Everyman offends by his tacit belief in man’s proud mastery over Nature. It is this pride that puts him in danger of death and devil (both figured in the giant ray), while his good deed (kindness to the baby porpoise) and his ability to reason finally save him.
Whereas the moral of Everyman is that we should forsake sin and devote ourselves to good deeds, which alone are pleasing to God; the chief moral of The Sea Devil is that we should never let our pride and greed blind us to the fact that we along with beast and bird and fish are all Nature’s creatures. In any fair battle, Nature is more able to turn her giant fist against us than we are to turn ours against her.
But the moral here is somehow not as convincing as the one in Everyman, perhaps because it is constantly being undermined by the diction, pacing, and tone of the whole tale. The man may free the half-dead mullet and vow never again to go casting alone at night, but the reader cannot forget how much of the tale is a celebration of the fierce exhilaration of the hunter at the moment of ambush.
- Review the traditional literary conflicts:Character v. Character, Character v. Nature, Character v. Machine, Character v. Self, Character v. Supernatural, Character v. Society, Character v. Destiny. Can you think of other categories? Recall stories, films, novels, poems, myths, and television programs that would fall into the character-against-nature category. Make a list and add suggestions from other students.
Arthur Gordon, 1912—
Arthur Gordon has a reputation for excellence in many pursuits. He attended Yale University where he earned a B.A. in 1934, and then travelled to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He graduated in 1936. When the United States joined World War II, he entered the U.S. Army Air Forces as a lieutenant; when the war was over, he was a lieutenant colonel who had earned an Air Medal and Legion of Merit. His writing career was equally meritorious. He was managing editor of Good Housekeeping from 1938-41(post interrupted by Pearl Harbour), and editor of Cosmopolitan from 1946-48. He has written both novels and non-fiction and has contributed over 200 stories and articles to major magazines. He makes his home in the city of his birth, Savannah, Georgia.
Exploring the Text
- Describe the part of the story that you liked the best and explain why. Describe the feelings you had when you were reading this story. Have you ever had similar feelings when you were reading another story? Explain. Share your thoughts with a partner.
- Reread the four paragraphs describing the protagonist near the beginning of the story, starting with words, “The man turned abruptly†(p.67). Working with two other people, make a list of all the things we learn about the protagonist in these paragraphs. Now select any three of these things and show how they become significant later in the story. Share your ideas with two other students.
- Reread the part of the story describing the man’s actions just prior to catching the mullet, then reread his actions just prior to netting the ray. Compare these two passages looking primarily for difference. In what ways do these differences prepare us for the accident?
- Consider what qualities humans possess that fish do not. At times during his struggle the man fights as all creatures, including people, fight when they are trapped; at other times his struggles are different. Analyze the difference in the two fighting techniques. Are there times when the first technique might work well? Why does it not work well in this situation?
Language
Reread the paragraph beginning, “Then the sea exploded…” (p. 70), and the two paragraphs that follow it. Make a list of all the action verbs you can find and all the adjectives that indicate a struggle. Using three of these verbs and three of these adjectives, write a paragraph about a very different kind of struggle–one in which no water is involved.
“Another Part of the Sky” by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
In Collins, the principal of an experimentally liberal reformatory Nadine Gordimer presents a man who possesses a few temperate faults and several moderate virtues, who is extraordinary only in certain ways and in small degrees, who is somewhat given to introspection, and who is reasonably self-aware. Why, then, should his final realization—that he has not room enough in his caring for the whole world—why should this rather commonplace epiphany have “filled him with desolation…stiffened him from head to foot with failure,†create a “moment of knowledge†so agonizing that “he did not know how he would live through†it? Our knowledge of Collins does not prepare us for it.
Perhaps our shock and bewilderment are meant to mirror Collins’s own; after all, we know of him only what he consciously knows of himself. There are, however, two cases in which the words of his inner dialogue give away more than he probably realizes. In the first of these instances he imagines his runaways living in a “cave of hunched faces painted with cosy fear by the light of a paraffintin fire…[a]troubled dreamlike existence of struggle and fear and horror,†and in the second he refers to his life as a struggle “to read the suffering faces of the nameless, the dispossessed whom God made it incumbent upon him that he should spend his life reading.â€Â These passages suggest that he sees himself—though he would almost certainly recoil from the thought—as a Christ-like messenger to the Platonic cave (The Republic, Book VII) of south Africa’s lowest caste. It is his task to lead boys away from the flickering fire, the “hovel of smoke,†the “half-discerned murk,†drawing like Socrates on “some memory beneath their experience,†eventually accustoming them to the world lit by the sun of public and private order, if not that of philosophic truth.
But in Plato’s analogy no one who has been led into the world of the sun ever returns (save against his will) to resume his old place in the world of the cave: more importantly, Christ, even a type of Christ, never fails in self-sacrificing charity to mankind. It is not surprising, when we consider the models in whose terms Collins sees the world, and against which he, albeit unconsciously, measures himself, that he should be crushed by a sudden perception of the face and extent of his failure, and should not even reflect on the fact that it is a failure common to all humanity. Nor is it surprising that Collins, so easily seduced by words as to forget reading them, should be so preternaturally irked by words, and especially by the contrast between their perennial promise of wholeness and their delivery of partial truths. The words in the newspapers have only belied him; the words in the core visions of Western culture, the words that shape and sustain Collins’s “part of the sky,†have betrayed him to a “desolation†and a taste of “bitter juice†which are merely, terrifyingly, human.
Nadine Gordimer, 1923-
A list of Nadine Gordimer‘s numerous international awards reveals her to be one of the most celebrated of the world’s writers in English: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1973, for A Guest of Honour; the Booker Prize for Fiction, 1974, for The Conservationist; the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, 1981; the Modern Language Association of America award, 1982; the Premio Malparte, 1985; her naming as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1986; and her receipt of honorary degrees from both Harvard and Yale universities.
Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, “through her magnificent epic writing has—in the words of Alfred Nobel—been of very great benefit to humanity.”
Gordimer published her first story at the age of fifteen, and since then she has written more than six novels and a dozen story collections. She has also contributed stories to anthologies worldwide. Born in Springs, South Africa, to Jewish emigrants from London, Gordimer has said she attained political awareness slowly, eventually condemning the country’s race laws she had been raised to accept. She is now widely considered to be one of the strongest voices of social conscience in South Africa.
According to New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, Gordimer’s “enduring subject” is “the consequences of apartheid on the daily lives of men and women, the distortions it produces in relationships among both blacks and whites.”
Nadine Gordimer, 1923—
A list of Nadine Gordimer’s numerous international awards reveals her to be one of the most celebrated of the world’s writers in English: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1973, for A Guest of Honour;  the Booker Prize for Fiction, 1974, for The Conservationist; the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, 1981; the Modern Language Association of America award, 1982; the Premio Malparte, 1985; her naming as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1986; and her receipt of honorary degrees from both Harvard and Yale universities. Gordimer published her first story at the age of fifteen, and since then she has written more than six novels and a dozen story collections. She has also contributed stories to anthologies worldwide. Born in Springs, South Africa, to Jewish emigrants from London, Gordimer has said she attained political awareness slowly, eventually condemning the country’s race laws she had been raised to accept. She is now widely considered to be one of the strongest voices of social conscience in South Africa. According to New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, Gordimer’s “enduring subject†is “the consequences of apartheid on the daily lives of men and women, the distortions it produces in relationships among both blacks and whites.