Tuesday, May 5, 2015

The Things They Carried - Perspectives and Styles

Today we discussed our first set of readings from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. We noticed the stories / chapters in the novel are told from a variety of different perspectives, including these:

  • 1st person (I, we) - protagonist
  • 1st person - witness
  • 1st person - reflective
  • 2nd person (You)
  • 3rd person (he / she / they) - omniscient (knows what each character is thinking and doing)
  • 3rd person - objective (describes actions, not emotions)
  • 3rd person - limited - story is focused through one character's awareness (like Huck)
We also noticed the stories are told in a variety of styles, using language in different ways, including:
  • Teaching a lesson
  • Formal
  • Informal
  • Imagine if...
  • Emotional
  • Description
  • Memoir
  • Poetry / Song
  • Factual
  • Reflective - looking back over time
  • Dialogue
  • Symbolic / Figurative
  • Lists
  • Detailed / expert language
We read chapter 3 - "Spin" - aloud. You chose one of the sections of that chapter and re-wrote it, using a different style and perspective.

Lastly, I had you generate a list of random memories. Then, you used this chart to write about them in a variety of different ways:
We closed by writing about this question: In what ways did writing about a memory in a variety of styles and perspectives shape your understanding of it? Now that you've written about it in these different ways, what do you now know that you didn't know before?