GRADE 12 International Baccalaureate
SUMMER 2015
READING ASSIGNMENT
SPRINGBROOK HIGH SCHOOL
The books assigned for summer reading for students entering the second year of
the IB program are The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Their Eyes Were
Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The Great Gatsby is a novel in Part 2 of the IB
English syllabus; it will be studied in preparation for the Oral Commentary in February.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel in Part 3 of the syllabus; it will be studied in
preparation for Paper 2, the second of two IB English exams to be taken next May. Read
both novels carefully over the summer. There will be tests on them early in first quarter.
In addition to reading these novels carefully, you must write a commentary on one
of them. Although papers written in IB English 2 are usually 1000 to 1500 words in length,
this one should be brief—between 500 and 750 words. What specific response to the
character(s) or situation or setting does the author evoke in you, the reader? Make the
answer to that question your main point; then chunk the passage (each chunk = one body
paragraph), and explain how the author uses literary devices to elicit that response.
Passages selected for commentary are often taken from the beginning of a novel; I
have therefore attached two introductory passages that would serve this purpose well.
Choose one of the attached passages, mark it up, and submit it with your paper. Consider
writing your commentary right after you read the introductory passage. If you discover
after finishing the novel that your inferences are somewhat off the mark, do not make
changes in your commentary. Your interpretation is valid as long as it presents a reasonable
hypothesis regarding the author’s purpose and is based on detailed evidence from the
selected passage. (Keep in mind that for the Paper 1 exam next May, you must analyze a
passage from a novel that is unfamiliar to you.)
The commentary will be due on the second day of school, September 1, 2015. At
that time, you must also submit your essay to Turnitin.com.
An option to consider: Instead of reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, why
not listen to it? Hurston’s use of southern black vernacular comes to life (and is easier to
understand) when voiced by acclaimed actress and narrator, Ruby Dee. It is available on
iTunes for $21.95; make sure you purchase the unabridged (i.e., full-length) version. Look
on Amazon for an audio version of The Great Gatsby narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal that has
good reviews and costs about the same.
Please double-space your
essay and provide an exact
word count.
Put “Essay #1” in the top
left-hand corner and your
name in the upper right.
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Chapter 1
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some
advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the
advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant
a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to
reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious
natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran
bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself
to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it
came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a
politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently
I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I
realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation
was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations of
young men or at least the terms in which they express them are
usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a
little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father
snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the
fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the
admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the
hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't
care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last
autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a
sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous
excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only
Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from
my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have
an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of
successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about
him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if
he were related to one of those intricate machines that register
earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had
nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is
dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was
an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I
have never found in any other person and which it is not likely
I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the
end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the
wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in
the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston: Chapter 1
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they
come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon,
never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes
away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the
life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and
remember everything they don’t want to forget.
The dream is the
truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from
burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at
the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the
bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was
gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for
sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things
and talk.
These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless
conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their
skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt
powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things.
They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had
stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their
minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with
questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A
mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether
like harmony in a song.
“What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find
no dress to put on? — Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?
— Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her? — What
dat ole forty year old ’oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her
back lak some young gal? — Where she left dat young lad of a boy she
went off here wid? — Thought she was going to marry? — Where he left
her? — What he done wid all her money? — Betcha he off wid some gal
so young she ain’t even got no hairs — why she don’t stay in her
class? —”
When she got to where they were she turned her face on the bander
log and spoke. They scrambled a noisy “good evenin’” and left their
mouths setting open and their ears full of hope.
Her speech was
pleasant enough, but she kept walking straight on to her gate. The
porch couldn’t talk for looking.
The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her
hip pockets; the great rope of hair swinging to her waist and
unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts
trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with
the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt
and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance.
It was a
weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance,
still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day.
But nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit
until after her gate slammed behind her.