English 1, Fall Homework for Monday
“Raymond’s Run”—Quotation Exercise
Please select 3 of the following 5 quotations and do both a summary and an analysis of them. Re-write the quotations followed by summaries and analyses on a separate sheet of paper.
Summary: You summarize or re-tell what the quotation says. You don’t supply any new information about it.
Analysis: What does the quotation tell us about the narrator’s character? In your analysis, tell us something about the quotation that is implied but not directly stated about the story or about the narrator’s character. In a sense, you’re telling us what’s going on underneath the words. A rich quotation will give the reader much more information than it directly states on the surface. In the following example, we learn a lot more about the narrator’s personality than simply what she says.
Example:
“I don’t play the dozens or believe in standing around with somebody in my face doing a lot of talking. I much rather just knock you down and take my chances even if I am a little girl with skinny arms and a squeaky voice, which is how I got the name Squeaky” (1).
Summary: In this quotation, the narrator says that she doesn’t believe in insulting other people—“play[ing] the dozens”—or “standing around” listening to insults about her; she would prefer to fight the other person physically even though she’s small and has a “squeaky” voice.
Analysis: Here, the narrator shows she’s tough. Despite being a small girl with a “squeaky” voice, she’s not afraid of “tak[ing] her chances” and getting beaten up. Being tough for Squeaky therefore means being willing to fight and being unafraid of getting hurt. What she really dislikes is people “standing around... in [her] face” and insulting her. Squeaky is very direct; she doesn’t want to bother wasting her time with words and she won’t tolerate any nonsense.
Note: In your analysis, be sure to include actual words from the quotation to explain how you reached the conclusions you did. Look at the above example to see how this is done.
1) “So I keep Raymond on the inside of me, and he plays like he’s driving a stagecoach which is O.K. by me so long as he doesn’t run me over or interrupt my breathing exercises, which I have to do on account of I’m serious about my running, and I don’t care who knows it” (1).
2) “And what do you know—Chopin’s waltzes just spring out of her fingertips and she’s the most surprised thing in the world. A regular prodigy. I could kill people like that” (2).
3) “The biggest thing on the program is the Maypole dancing, which I can do without, thank you, even if my mother thinks it’s a shame I don’t take part and act like a girl for a change” (3).
4) “You’d think they’d know better than to encourage that kind of nonsense. I am not a strawberry. I do not dance on my toes. I run. That is what I am all about” (3).
5) “We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It’s about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don’t practice real smiling every day, you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people” (6).