CHARACTERS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 449.

NARRATOR

1. What kind of narrator tells the story?

a) first person, b) omniscient third person, c) limited third person

2. In your opinion, are all parts of the story told from the same or different points of view? Whose points of view are they? Whose point of view dominates ph 1, ph 3, ph 4, ph 5, ph 7-9, ph 10-17?

3. What attitude of the narrator to the described society is implied in

- ‘the spirit of kindness died very hard in women'

- ‘When one is an artist one has no time simply for people who won't respond. Has one?'

1.The opening paragraph gives a desciption of Ian French.

- Is it mainly positive or negative? Circle the words with negative and positive connotations.

- Comment on the syntactical structure of the opening sentences. What does it add to the description?

2. What do similies add to the portrait of Ian?

- Identify the extended simile in the opening paragraph. What attitude does it arouse towards the boy? What does it suggest about the personality of the narrator?

- Pick out two similes from ph 4 and comment on their stylistic functions and implication.

3. Re-read the physical descriptions of Ian French and the girl. Fill in the table with the details you can find in the text. Comment on the role of lexical co-relations. Find more co-relations in the description of the girl's manners (ph 10 )

Why does the author pay so much attention to clothes? What role do the colour-adjectives play?

4. What is the effect of the repetition of ‘Hopeless' in phs 3-4?

5. Ian French appears to be both childish and mature: find evidence of both of these aspects of his personality in the text. Distinguish between cases of direct and indirect (through the character's thoughts and actions, and opinion of others) characterization.

6. Disclose the implications of the following

- ‘Not to go to the side window before a certain hour'

- ‘...she walked as though she was eager to be done with this world of grown-ups'

7. Prove by the text that

- the purity of the boy's attitude to women is contrasted to the ugliness of the world outside

- Ian's innocence lay in the attitude he adopted towards the man-woman human relationship

- he took care to nurture what was pure and straight in his unconventional mode of life

8. Fantasy or fantasizing is an element which recurs in Mansfield's works. Is Ian's fantasizing a response to his

- loneliness?

- social pressure?

- demands of an artistic nature?

9. Which of the following adjectives would you choose to describe Ian French? Justify your choices by referring to the text.

Immature

Lonely

Dull

Pure

Childish

Dreamy

Stubborn

Socially inexperienced

Other-wordly

Self-confident

Unconventional

Arrogant

Other_________

10. There is an opinion that in the stories told by Mansfield as a feminine writer male characters are often invested with feminine thoughts and feelings. Does not Ian strike you as an example? Which of his thoughts and actions are not very characteristic of men?

11. Is Ian French

- a rounded character?

- a one-dimensional (flat) character?

- a simplistic character?

- a true-to-life character ?