Friday, December 13 "On a Rainy River" day 3; tests on story vocab and figurative language

In class: test on 10 vocabulary words from "On a Rainy River" and figurative language material from Monday and Tuesday.

Starting the story

Focus Your Reading

1. “On the Rainy River” is told from the first-person point of view.

2. • The narrator is a character in the story and so participates in the events he recounts.
– Readers see things through the narrator’s eyes.

3.• His comments and descriptions convey the difficulty of the momentous decision he faces.

4. In this story, the author blurs the line between fact and fiction by calling his narrator “Tim O’Brien.”
– The story, however, is work of fiction.

5. • As you read, notice how O’Brien’s use of the first person point of view affects your feelings about the narrator.

READ THE FIRST  PARAGRAPH  SILENTLY, UNDERLINING THOSE WORDS AND PHRASES THAT STAND OUT AS MARKERS THAT GIVE YOU INSIGHT INTO THIS CHARACTER'S FEELINGS, THOUGHTS OR PERSONALITY. BE PREPARED TO EXPLAIN YOUR REASONING.



This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister,
 not even to my wife. To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession. Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough, if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough-I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.