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. “It is difficult to explain about Guenever, unless it is possible to love two people at the same time. Probably it is not possible to love two people in the same way, but there are different kinds of love. Women love their children and their husbands at the same time—and men often feel a lusty thought for one woman while they are feeling a love of the heart for another. 2. In some way such as this, Guenever came to love the Frenchman without losing her affection for Arthur. 3. She and Lancelot were hardly more than children when it began, and the King was about eight years their senior. At twenty-two, the age of thirty seems to be the verge of senility. 4. The marriage between her and Arthur had been what they call a “made” marriage. That is to say, it had been fixed by a treaty with King Leodegrance without consulting her. It had been a successful union, as “made” marriages often are, and before Lancelot came on the scene, the young girl had adored her famous husband, even if he was so old. 5. She had felt respect for him, with gratitude, love, and a sense of protection. She had felt more than this, you might say that she felt everything except the passion of romance.” (362-363)

Part II

1. “One reason for [Lancelot's] dilemma [about Guenever] was that he was a Christian. […] His Church in which he had been brought up—and it is difficult to escape from your upbringing—directly forbade him to seduce his best friend's wife. 2. Another stumbling block to doing as he pleased was the very idea of chivalry or of civilization, which Arthur had first invented and then introduced to his own young mind. Perhaps a bad baron who believed in the Strong Arm might have gone off with Guenever even in the face of the Church's councils, because taking your neighbor's wife was really a form of Fort Mayne. It was a matter of the stronger bull winning. 3. But Lancelot had spent his childhood between knightly exercises and thinking out King Arthur's theory for himself. He believed as firmly as Arthur did, as firmly as the benighted Christian, that there was such a thing as Right.” (367)

Part III

1. “Finally, there was the impediment of [Lancelot's] nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur, and he loved Guenever, and he hated himself. 2. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. 3. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque shell with a face like Quasimodo's, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny , by something which is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.” (368)

Part IV

1. The slow discovery of the seventh sense [knowledge of the world], by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification, and hypocrisy—this discovery is not a matter for triumph. 2. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. 3. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.

4. At this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. 5. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.” (378)