a.
Techniques: immersion into the experience. He
paints vivid images as soon as the piece begins, but not before he puts it in
context. Summarization - quick summaries
of backstory to be developed later. He picks out the most minute details like
the dragonfly and a fork and a bait box and gives special meaning to them.
b.
Voice: Open and honest. He lets us into the process
of remembering and re-finding the place. He lets us into his mind and what he’s
thinking and how he feels like his father.
c.
Telling: He tells at the very beginning. It is
interesting enough to keep me focused for the second sentence, which contrasts
the telling with vivid imagery. “I felt dizzy and didn’t know what rod I was at
the end of.” He tells there, but it is such a bizarre statement that it engages
us.
d.
Form: simple paragraph form, but each paragraph
serves a purpose. 1-Backstory, 2,-remembering, 3-lake description, 4-I am my
father, 5-Lack of passed time, 6-trusting the lake, 7-changes, 8-painting the
town, 9-travel, 10-boat memories, 11-father-son adventures, 12-storm
description, 13-Feeling the feels of his son. The middle to end sections give
less poignant insight like deciding that he is his father, but give us more
details and imageryo the entire endeavor, so by the end paragraph when he makes
the final connection to being his son, we have a very vivid picture placed
within a larger scene we can also place.
e.
Weird and cool stuff: He doesn’t mention that
there are other campers at the camp except in passing during paragraph 6. No
mention of his wife or other family members. “The waitresses were still 15,” he
doesn’t specify that certain things are false or imagined. “No loud wonderful
fuss about trunks.”
f.
Q’s: The piece is separated into general
sections of back-story, meaning and insight, and imagery and description. Which
section was your favorite? Could I have stood alone or how does it rely on the
other parts?
What was the value of leaving out other family details? Leaving other
campers until certain points of the text and mentioning them in passing? Do we
get a greater (but false?) sense of their solitude?
g.
Write about: A time or place where/when you felt
like you were living in another person’s shoes, associating your actions with
someone else’s, just as White associates all his actions with either his father
or his son. Think of places once dominated by someone close to you that you now
dominate or fill.
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