Post date: Jan 24, 2014 6:32:54 PM
(Suggested time — 40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
Read the following passage from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). Then, in a well-
organized essay, analyze the literary techniques Oates uses to characterize the speaker, Judd Mulvaney.
Support your analysis with specific references to the passage.
That time in our lower driveway, by the brook.
I was straddling my bike staring down into the water.
Fast-flowing clear water, shallow, shale beneath, and
lots of leaves. Sky the color of lead and the light
5 mostly drained so I couldn’t see my face only the
dark shape of a head that could be anybody’s head.
Hypnotizing myself the way kids do. Lonely kids,
or kids not realizing they’re lonely. The brook was
flowing below left to right (east to west, though at
10 a slant) and I stood immobile leaning on the railing
(pretty damn rotted: I’d tell Dad it needed to be
replaced with new planks, we could do it together)
until it began to happen as it always does the water
gets slower and slower and you’re the one who
15 begins to move—oh boy! we-ird! scary and ticklish
in the groin and I leaned farther and farther over the
rail staring into the water and I was moving, moving
helplessly forward, it seemed I was moving somehow
upward, rising into the air, helpless, in that instant
20 aware of my heart beating ONEtwothree
ONEtwothree! thinking Every heartbeat is past and
gone! Every heartbeat is past and gone! A chill came
over me, I began to shiver. It wasn’t warm weather
now but might have been late as November, most of
25 the leaves blown from the trees. Only the evergreens
and some of the black birches remaining but it’s a fact
when dry yellow leaves (like on the birches) don’t fall
from a tree the tree is partly dead. A light gritty film
of snow on the ground, darkest in the crevices where
30 you’d expect shadow so it was like a film negative.
Every heartbeat is past and gone! Every heartbeat is
past and gone! in a trance that was like a trance of
fury, raging hurt Am I going to die? because I did not
believe that Judd Mulvaney could die. (Though on a
35 farm living things are dying, dying, dying all the time,
and many have been named, and others are born
taking their places not even knowing that they are
taking the places of those who have died.) So I knew,
I wasn’t a dope, but I didn’t know—not really. Aged
40 eleven, or maybe twelve. Leaning over the rotted rail
gaping at the water hypnotized and scared and
suddenly there came Dad and Mike in the mud-
colored Ford pickup (Might as well buy our vehicles
mud-colored to begin with, saves time, was Dad’s
45 logic) barreling up the drive, bouncing and rattling.
On the truck’s doors were neat curving white letters
sweet to see MULVANEY ROOFING (716) 689-8329.
They’d be passing so close my bike might snag in a
fender so I grabbed it and hauled it to the side. Mike
50 had rolled down his window to lean out and pretend
to cuff at my head—“Hey Ranger-kid: what’s up?”
Dad at the wheel grinned and laughed and next
second they were past, the pickup in full throttle
ascending the drive. And I looked after them, these
55 two people so remarkable to me, my dad who was like
nobody else’s dad and my big brother who was—
well, Mike Mulvaney: “Mule” Mulvaney—and the
most terrible thought came to me.
Them, too. All of them. Every heartbeat past and
60 gone.
It stayed with me for a long time, maybe forever.
Not just that I would lose the people I loved, but they
would lose me—Judson Andrew Mulvaney. And they
knew nothing of it. (Did they?) And I, just a skinny
65 kid, the runt of the litter at High Point Farm, would
have to pretend not to know what I knew.