Sandra K. Friday
Just as first impressions in real life often determine the future of a relationship with someone we are meeting or noticing for the first time, so fictional characters in literature may win us over or lose our interest in our first impression of them. Before beginning Ellen Foster, I plan to begin the unit by introducing my students to the first sentences of a few novels, and solicit their first impressions. We will attempt to raise our awareness of the biases and mindsets we bring with us when we "read" a fictional character.
Beginning with Clarice Precious Jones, the narrator of Push, students will try out the Six-step template: Marking and Discussing the Passage, and will share their findings. Obviously with our initial first impressions of characters through first lines of books, students will be meeting these characters for the first time, so they will suspend step five. Some students will be familiar with the close reading template I am asking them to use while others may be using it for the first time. Therefore we will use these first impressions of characters as an introduction, or a refresher for using the Mark and Discuss Template.
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I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver . . .
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I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter
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got Down Sinder. She's retarded . . . I should be in the eleventh grade, . . .
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But I'm in the ninfe grade. I got suspended from school 'cause I'm pregnant. . . .
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(Sapphire 3).
Students will begin to share their findings: what have they observed about Precious, and what led them to these first impressions? For example, many students will have underlined and/or circled words such as fahver, ninfe, and ain', and no doubt will have written in their margin a question or an observation about "the way she talks." Most, no doubt, will underline or circle, and question in the margin the meaning of the phrase "Down Sinder." This is a perfect opportunity to explore what we can learn about a character from his or her language. And then going beyond the words to their meaning, what exactly can they observe or question in these three sentences, about Precious: her age, her history, her family, her education, her present situation, her candor, and her feelings. As students share the questions and observations they wrote in the margins of their page, they might share the word or phrase that they think is the most important, most revealing about Precious, in the passage and tell why. I guess, for me, it is the first four words, "I was left back . . ." After making our way through this exercise, I will ask a few students to share number six of the template.
And then for something completely beyond the realm of reason, we will turn to the first few sentences of Franz Kafka's novella, The Metamorphosis, in which the reader is confronted with a man who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle.
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One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found
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himself in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard,
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armorlike back, . . . he could view his brown, vaulted belly partitioned by arching
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ridges, . . . His many legs . . . danced helplessly before his eyes (Norton 1999).
Marking and discussing this passage as they did the opening lines of Push is bound to elicit some very different responses and questions among the students as they share their first impressions of Gregor Samsa. I hope students will have underlined and/or circled "agitated dreams," and "monstrous vermin," and "transformed." Although they know the basic meaning of the word "transformed," it is a powerful word in light of the ramifications; a man awakes radically altered into a giant beetle. An important question will be, "How does one read the character of Gregor?" Is the reader discovering what has happened to Gregor at the same time that Gregor is discovering it? If so, what does that feel like, as a reader? What does the reader infer that it feels like to be Gregor? It might be worthwhile including the very next line of the story to rule out what students will suspect, "It was no dream." I will ask what might be inferred by the fact that Gregor awoke as a giant beetle. What do the living habits of a beetle conjure up? Would we read him differently had he awakened as a cat or an eagle? First impressions of Gregor and his rather startling transformation will no doubt pique my students' curiosity to read more. We must consider point of view because unlike Precious who narrates her story, Gregor's story is not told by him, but rather a third person.
I have included a lesson plan for the first few sentences in The Kite Runner which also has a very compelling opening as told by the protagonist, Amir, whose character we can read as he describes growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the guilt he has been carrying around for twenty-six years.
