Quote and Character Identification
For the exam you should be able to identify the source and speaker of each
quote. You also should know who or what the quote is referring to, as well.
You are also expected to know the main characters from each Lit Circle
Novel.
Americans are much more American than they are Northerners,
Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners…California Chinese, Boston Irish,
Wisconsin Germans, and yes, Alabama Negroes have more in common
than they do apart.
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while
the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever
another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to
God I will.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was
assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years
described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I
was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight
perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.
I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to someone I’m not at all glad I met. If you
want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though
My brother D.B.’s a writer and all, and my brother Allie, the one that died, that I
told you about, was a wizard. I’m the only really dumb one.
…because my planned trip had aroused some satiric remarks among my friends,
I named it (my camper) Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of
Don Quixote's horse.
Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied
with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who
people the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones
stayed home and are still there.
One of my purposes was to listen, to hear speech, accent, speech rhythms,
overtones and emphasis. For speech is so much more than words and
sentences. I did listen everywhere. It seemed to me that regional speech is in the
process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty
years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy
localness, by a slow, inevitable process.
In Country
Emmett – “…a large man of thirty-five with pimples on his face … he has smoked
since he was in the army…the war messed him up.” He is
Sam Hughes – a 17 year-old who is obsessed with the Vietnam War and the
effect it has had on her life after losing a father she never knew.
Caucasia
Birdie Lee (Jesse Goldman) – the main character and narrator. She is more light
skinned than her sister Cole and stays with her mother when the family breaks
up. Her and her mother are on the run from the FBI. She changes her name to
Jesse Goldman.
Sandy Lee (Sheila Goldman) – mother of Cole and Birdie. She was a WASP
who marries a black intellectual and gets involved in radical groups connected
with the Black Power movement in the 1970s. She is on the run from the FBI due
to some of her activities and changes her name to Sheila Goldman.
Deck Lee – a Black intellectual who is working on a book about race. He is
married to a white woman, but leaves her and moves to Brazil with Cole to
escape racial discrimination of America.
Cole Lee – the older Lee sister. She is darker than Birdie and closer to her
father. She stays with him when the family breaks up.
The Namesake
Ashima Ganguli – a Bengali immigrant from India, she struggles to get used to
American customs and values.
Ashoke Ganguli – a professor at MIT. He survived a train accident that nearly
took his life. It is arranged for him to marry Ashima, and he moves her to the
United States in the late 1960s
Gogol (Nikhil) Ganguli – named after his father’s favorite author, he struggles
with his identity. He is embarrassed by some of his parents’ customs and values
as he tries to grow up as an average American young man.