Topic Review Activity 2

"Tenente," Passini said. "We understand you let us talk. Listen. There is nothing as bad as war. We in the auto-ambulance cannot even realize at all how bad it is. When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made." "I know it is bad but we must finish it." "It doesn't finish. There is no finish to a war." "Yes there is." Passini shook his head. "War is not won by victory. What if we take San Gabriele? What if we take the Carso and Monfalcome and Trieste? Where are we then? Did you see all the far mountains to-day? Do you think we could take all them too? Only if the Austrians stop fighting. One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have their own country. But no, instead there is a war." Which best describes the effect of Passini's long pieces of dialogue?

They indicate that Passini feels passionately about his beliefs.

The road was crowded and there were screens of corn-stalk and straw matting on both sides and matting over the top so that it was like the entrance at a circus or a native village. Keeping in mind Hemingway's iceberg principle, what feeling is he trying to convey by describing the scene as an "entrance to a circus or a native village"?

a feeling of unease as the narrator is driving into a peculiar and alien location

The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. The appearance of Gatsby from the shadows suggests that

he is a man of mystery and secrets.

After World War I, writers like Henry James felt that words such as "glory," "honor," and "courage" took on a

more negative connotation.

Which excerpt from The Great Gatsby best indicates that Nick is not fully content with his life?

Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. According to Faulkner, what is the biggest problem preventing young writers from producing "good writing"?

Young writers live in physical fear and therefore are prevented from concentrating on matters of the spirit.

Because of his journalistic background, Ernest Hemingway's diction tends to be

a combination of formal and informal.

Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They were not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. The use of words such as "fashionable," "superficial," "bizarre," and "sinister" provide

a sense of artificiality in the world the narrator finds himself in.

The war literature of some early twentieth-century American writers, such as Elie Wiesel, focused on

the violence directed at noncombatants.