Strombeck/ENG 420/Final
Final is to be emailed to andrew.strombeck@wright.edu by 8 pm on 3/17/2010.
Part I Short Answer (40 pts)
In a few sentences, explain the significance of the quotation in terms of 1) ideas discussed in class and/or
2) the themes of the work. Please be as specific as possible. Do not just summarize what is happening at
this point in the book. Choose EIGHT of the passages below.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú? The only answer I can give you
is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. […] Which is to say if you’re looking
for a full story, I don’t have it. Oscar searched for it too, in his last days, and its not certain
whether he found it either” (243).
“It was the first time ever that Beli had her own space totally under her control, so while the
Gangster dozed restfully in a hamaca she busied herself with playing wife, with creating a
preliminary draft of the household they would soon inhabit. Mornings she would subject the
cabana to the harshest of scourings and hang boisterous profusions of flowers from every beam
and around every beam […] while her bartering produce and fish from the neighbors resulted in
one spectacular meal after another” (133).
It’s strange. If he’d said no, nigger would probably still be OK. (If you call being fukú’d, being
beyond misery, OK.) But this ain’t no Marvel Comics What if?—speculation will have to wait—
time, as they say, is growing short (270).
One night not long after the condom-foil incident Oscar woke up in his overly air-conditioned
room and realized with unusual clarity that he was heading down the same road again. The road
where he became so nuts over a girl he stopped thinking. The road where bad things happened
(294).
Every Dominican family has stories about crazy loves, about niggers who take love too far, and
Oscar’s family was no different
His abuelo, the dead one, had been unyielding about one thing or another (no one ever
exactly said) and ended up in prison, first mad, then dead; his abuela Nena Inca had lost her
husband six months after they got married. […]
And now it seemed that it was Oscar’s turn. Welcome to the family, his sister said in a
dream. The real family” (45)
For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital,
because white smoke has no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed
sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible
scattered smoke (13).
“We were the best. U.S. Army. We butchered every Jap we found. No Jap bastard was fit to take
prisoner. We had all kinds of ways to get information out of them before they died. Cut of this,
cut off these.” Emo was grinning and hunched over, staring at the teeth (36).
They called outside his house
“You downstairs, how are things?”
“Okay,” he said, “come down.”
They went down inside.
“Maybe you want something?”
“Yes. We need tobacco.”
Caterpillar spread out dry corn husks on the floor.
He rubbed his hands together and tobacco fell into the corn husks. (167)
9. The sun felt good; he could smell the juniper and piñon still damp from the rain. The wind carried
a wide honey smell from the meadows of beeweed. […] He pulled off his boots and socks and
dug his toes deep into the damp sand; then he started walking again” (205).
10. The problem was that the books were written by white people who did not think about drought or
winter blizzards or dry thistles, which the cattle had to live with. When Tayo saw Ulibarri’s
cattle, he thought of the diagram of the ideal beef cow which had been in the back of one of the
books, and these cattle were everything that the ideal cow was not. They were tall and had long
thin legs like deer; their heads were long and angular, with heavy bone across the eyes supporting
wide sharp horns which curved out over the shoulders. Their eyes were big and wild (69).
Part II Essays (60 pts):
Choose TWO of the essays below. Rough length: Plan to spend about 40 minutes on each essay. While in
general, I want you to respond to the prompts in the fullest manner possible within the allotted time, you
can use the following as a rough goal: Essays should be approximately 6-7 paragraphs long, where a
paragraph is 4-7 sentences.
1. Identity and story As we’ve discussed, questions of identity—who am I?—and story—what story do
I tell about myself—shape, in one way or another, every text we’ve read this quarter. Psychologists
say that the story we tell about ourselves—this is where I come from, these are my people, this is my
race, my gender, my ethnicity—helps unite the different parts of our identity. In a well constructed,
detailed essay that draws on one novel from BEFORE the midterm and one novel AFTER the
midterm, compare and contrast the way two of the novels explore identity and storytelling. Your
thesis should be some conclusion about identity and story as it appears in the two works. Try to push
past surface conclusions to say something substantial about the role story plays for the two novels’
characters.
2. Witchery/Fukú Both Ceremony and The Brief Life of Oscar Wao suggest that overarching
supernatural forces might be to blame for their characters’ misfortunes. Simultaneously, though, these
supernatural forces give the characters something to struggle against; both Tayo and Oscar embark on
heroic quests to defeat, respectively, witchery and the fukú. In a well-constructed, detailed essay,
explain the effect these supernatural forces have on the novels’ characters. Some of the questions you
might explore here include: why are these supernatural forces appropriate for novels that concern
ethnic identity? how do these forces help the characters explain their place in the world?
3. Disrupted reading experience Both Ceremony and The Brief Life of Oscar Wao employ
unconventional styles. Ceremony both integrates poems with native mythology and begins with a
series of disconnected scenes. Oscar Wao moves around in time (back, forward, then back again),
frequently invokes science fiction or fantasy comparisons, and constantly questions its own authority.
In a well-constructed, detailed essay, choose ONE of these stylistic effects from ONE novel. Explain
how it works, how it affects the reader’s experience, and what purpose it serves for the author.