English 1362—001 FINAL EXAM Fall, 2015

In separated responses of identification and commentary, first (1) identify three of these selected passages by author, title of novel, and each passage’s setting, and second (2) comment in an essay on the significantmeaning for this course of each passage that you have identified. (1 = 15 points; 2 = 18 points) So three identifications followed by three essays of commentary.
1. “Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just four. That’s literally, by the inventory, all there are! . . . .”
“If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides—the impression, somehow, of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone.”

2. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and looked at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty.

3. Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights . . . . And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of [his] wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of [the] dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him . . . .

4. No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.

5. The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath. There’s a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, must be the smell either of death or of spring—I hope of spring. But don’t let me trick you, there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me. And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stenches of death.
6. [He] also worried about Ewing’s tumor and melanoma. Catastrophes were
lurking everywhere, too numerous to count. When he contemplated the
many diseases and potential accidents threatening him, he was positively
astounded that he had managed to survive in good health for as long as he
had. It was miraculous. Each day he faced was another dangerous mission
against mortality. And he had been surviving them for twenty-eight years.

7. [Beryl Parminter] began to cry again. She wanted to crawl out of the room.
But something held her there. It was probably Oswald. There was some-
thing in Oswald’s face, a glance at the camera before he was shot, that
put him here in the audience, among the rest of us, sleepless in our homes
—a glance, a way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel,
that he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his sense of
the crime. Something in the look, some sly intelligence, exceedingly brief
but far-reaching, a connection all but bleached away by glare, tells us that
he is outside the moment, watching with the rest of us. This is what kept
Beryl in the room, this and the feeling that it was cowardly to hide.
He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being
shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes
another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying.

8. And so I have cleaned my house. With Jewel—I lay by the lamp, holding
up my own head, watching him cap and suture it before he breathed—the
wild blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased. Then there was only
the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence, getting
ready to clean my house.

9. Sleepless in the early hours, you make a nest out of your own fears—there
must have been survival advantage in dreaming up bad outcomes and
scheming to avoid them. This trick of dark imagining is one legacy of
natural selection in a dangerous world.