Summer Reading

2. Complete the following writing assignments as a typed document which you should submit during class in September and, later, on turnitin.com:

In The Color Purple, the main character, Celie, is discovering herself. In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the main character, Holly Golightly, is escaping from herself. Celie survives by learning how to rely on her inner strength, while Holly survives through manipulating the world around her.

Identify three challenges each character faces and what we—as readers—learn as a result. (That means you must identify six challenges + lessons altogether.) For each challenge and lesson, provide a quote from the relevant novel and explain how this supports your claim.

Here’s an example for each book. Follow the formatting as it appears below:

In "Breakfast at Tiffany’s", the narrator says to Holly: “You call yourself a free spirit, a ‘wild thing,’ and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself” (Capote 81). Holly’s challenge appears here through how she defines herself. While she considers herself free, the narrator can see that she isn’t free but confined by that label of being wild and free-spirited. Ironically, in attempting to stay wild, she actually limits herself. We learn, through Holly, that, when a person runs from her true identity, that running dictates her life choices rather than liberates her. Acceptance and honesty, on the other hand, set people free.

In, The Color Purple, Celie first writes “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy” (Walker 1). In this line, Celie faces the challenge of her father abusing her, the weight of the secret, and the way it could affect her mother. She learns that, through writing about it—in the form of letters—she can somewhat cope and withstand this abuse. Writing letters would later become Celie’s main method of releasing the weight of this burden.