Unit 5: Fences

Support your responses with textual evidence.

1. Who is telling this story and where/when is it set?

2. Describe the narrator, Sonny’s brother.  What does he do for a living?  What kind of guy is he? etc.

3. Describe the story’s plot.  (Plot = sequence of events: first x happens; then y; then w; and so on.)

4. Describe Sonny.  What does he value, what are his problems, etc.

5. What's the brother's problem with Sonny?  Consider this passage:  "All this was carrying me some place I didn’t want to go. . .It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace. . ."  What's the "menace"?   What danger is this brother confronting?

6. Describe Sonny's relationship with music.  How does he feel about it?  What does it do for him?   Consider this passage, in which Sonny describes some street singers:  ". . .the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last." Consider also this passage, in which the brother observes one of the musicians playing on stage with Sonny near the end of the story: “He was having a dialogue with Sonny.  He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water."   What is meant by “deep water”?

7. Who is this story primarily about?  Support your answer with reasons and evidence from the story itself.

8. What is this story primarily about? Support your answer with reasons and evidence from the story itself. 

9. What perspective on art can be generated from this story?