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. “'We will call it the Joyous Island,” [Elaine] said. “We shall be so happy there. 2. And Lance,'--he flinched when she called him by the pet name--'I want you to have your hobbies. 3. We must have tournaments, and hawking, and plenty of things to do. You must invite people to stay, so that we can have company. 4. I promise I won't be jealous of you, Lance, and I won't try to live in your pocket. 5. Don't you think we might have a happy life if we are careful? Don't you think the Joyous Isle would be a lovely name?'” (411)

Part II

1. “Lancelot stopped at once, as if he were a farm laborer who had been given permission to knock off for dinner. 2. He stuck his sword in the ground as if it were a pitchfork, and stood patiently. 3. He had, indeed, only been working with the quiet patience of a farm hand. He had not been trying to hurt his opponent.” (414)

Part III

1. “Elaine had come down from her gallery and was waiting at the end of the tilt yard. She was now to welcome, as she knew well, the people who were to break her heart. 2. She did not interfere with their greetings, but watched them like a child who had been left out of a game. 3. She stood still, gathering her forces. All her powers, all the frontier guards of her spirit, were being called in and concentrated at the citadel of her heart.” (416)

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)

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)

Turn page over

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)

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).

Teacher Model:

1. “You see, Might is not Right. 2. But, there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it. 3. It is as if people were half horrible and half nice. 4. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are left to themselves, they run wild. 5. You get the average baron that we wee nowadays, people like Sir Bruce Sans Pitie, who simply go clod-hopping round the country, and doing exactly what they please, for sport. 6. It is our Norman idea about the upper classes having a monopoly of power, without reference to justice. 7. The the horrible side gets uppermost, and there is thieving, and rape, and plunder, and torture. 8. People become beasts.” (p. 247)

As a Class:

1. “Now, what I have thought,” said Arthur, “is this. Why can't you harness Might so that it works for Right? 2. I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can't just say that there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can't neglect it. 3. You can't cut it out, but you might be able to direct it if you see what I mean, so that it will be useful instead of bad.” (p. 248)

Independent Practice:

1. “My idea is that if we can win this battle in front of us, and get a firm hold of the country, then I will institute a sort of order of chivalry. 2. I will not punish the bad knights or hang Lot, but I will try to get them into our Order. 3. We shall have to make it a great honor, you see, and make it fashionable and all that. Everybody must want to be in. 4. And then I shall make the oath of the Order that Might is only to be used for Right. Do you follow? 5. The knights in my order will ride all over the world, still dressed in steel and whacking away with their swords—that will give an outlet for wanting to whack, you understand, an outlet for what Merlyn calls the foxhunting spirit—but they will be bound to strike only on behalf of what is good, to defend virgins against Sir Bruce and to restore what has been done wrong in the past and to help the oppressed and so forth. Do you see the idea? 6. It will be by using the Might instead of fighting against it, and turning a bad thing into a good.” (p. 248)