Close Reading - Deciphering the Details

Close Reading

Deciphering the Details

When you do a close reading, you are looking deeply into the meaning of a small section of your text.

Directions: On a loose-leaf sheet of paper, write a comment for each numbered sentence(s).

Part I

1. “[Lancelot] did not notice anything particular about [Guenever] because his mind was filled with previous pictures which he had made for himself. 2. There was no room for pictures of what she was really like. 3. He thought of her only as the person who had robbed him, and, since robbers are deceitful, designing, and heartless people, he thought of her as one of these.” (p. 331)

Part II

1. “The young man [Lancelot] knew, in this moment, that he had hurt a real person, of his own age. 2. He saw in [Guenever's] eyes that she thought he was hateful, and that he had surprised her badly. She had been giving kindness, and he had returned it with unkindness. 3. But the main thing was that she was a real person. She was not a minx, not deceitful, not designing and heartless. She was pretty Jenny, who could think and feel.” (p. 334)

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Part III

1. “[Lancelot] had a contradictory nature which was far from holy. His Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad. 2. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them. 3. For one thing, he liked to hurt people. It was for the strange reason that he was cruel, that the poor fellow never killed a man who asked for mercy, or committed a cruel action which he could have prevented. 4. One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her. He might never have noticed her as a person if he had not seen the pain in her eyes.” (p. 339)

Part IV

1. “A man who was not afflicted by ambitions of decency in his mind might simply have run away with his hero's wife, and then perhaps the tragedy of Arthur would never have happened. 2. An ordinary fellow, who did not spend half his life torturing himself by trying to discover what was right so as to conquer his inclination towards what was wrong, might have cut the knot which brought their ruin.” (p. 339)