1. Summarize the plot of the story into Inciting
Incident, Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution.
You should write a one to two sentence summary for each portion of plot.
Wherever appropriate, list the stages of the hero journey in your description
(Ex. Inciting Incident: Jeff decides to build a pipe rack for his father, which
is also the Call to Adventure.)
Inciting Incident- Jeff decides to build a pipe rack for his
dad.
Exposition- The colonel’s son was twelve the winter
he started to make the pipe rack for his father. He was a handsome,
dark-eyed boy, with a voice as high and clear as a
choir-boy’s and a quickness, a nimbleness, about him that was in his mind as
well as in his flesh. He had a skill for carpentry and mechanics in his
fingers, and he could shoot game as expertly as any man his father hunted
with. In the cellar of the house in which they were billeted in
“Look, Jeff, the idea is this,” the
colonel would say, and, quickly, expertly, he would sketch the plan of the
bookshelf, or the oval tray or the wren house. The boy would come close
to study what he drew, and they would talk of the quality of wood and of the
forests of home. “Someday we’ll build a shack in the wilderness, a real
log cabin, with timber we’ve cut down ourselves,” the father would say,
speaking of
Every morning a staff car would come along under the tall, ancient chestnut trees that lined the avenue, and the boy would stand in the window and watch the man dressed so trimly as a colonel go down the gravel of the path to wait on the sidewalk until the driver had slipped from under the wheel and opened the car door. For he was a doctor, and this was his routine. At a quarter past eight he would leave for the army hospital, playing the role six days of every week, and two Sundays out of every month. The rest of the time he was a man in a khaki shirt, with the collar open, who worked at the carpenter’s bench with his son, or took him hunting in the German hills, or stretched out his legs at leisure while he read of the other, wider forest lands of home.
It was winter, and the mother had taking the boy’s sister off for a two-week visit to Swiss and Austrian skiing places, leaving the men with the German maid who came at half passed seven and left again at half passed three. If the beds were aired and made, the food bought, cooked, the house cleaned, it was accomplished while the men were away. For, in spite of the wisdom in his eyes, the boy was a schoolboy, and after his father had gone off in the morning, he would take his bicycle out and throw one leg in the blue jeans over its saddle and, his coon cap in his head, speed down the wintry, tree-lined avenue. This was their life, and it might have continued in this coupled intimacy had not the boy thought of making the pipe rack for his father’s birthday, which was a week away.
Rising action- That was the first night,
and it could not be said that the suspicion came to him at once, but at the end
of the first half hour the beginning of it was there. There was nothing
the senses could identify, but every now and then he would lift his eyes from
his work and look at the row of masks in uneasiness. “You fox, you devil,” he
would say aloud; “you are making me nervous.” But on the second night he
was so much aware of the indefinable presence that at one instant he swung
around from the table, and the wood he was working with fell from his
hand. But there was no stir of other life in the cold silence of the
attic.
“When you’re ready to start working in the shop again,” said the colonel one
evening if that long week, “I had an idea. I thought of making a Lazy
Susan for the Dining room before the womenfolk get back.”
“Sure,” said the boy, “sure but I’ve got homework to do.” and he saw the
eagerness fade quickly from his father’s face. Then he turned his head as
in guilt, and started up the stairs.
He passed the bedroom floor, where the mother often sat in her own room at her
desk in the evening, writing letters home. But now her room was empty and
his sister’s room was empty, and he mounted swiftly, softly, in his ancient
sneakers, to the floor above. His own room was there, and the extra
bathroom, and the spare room; and the attic was even
higher in the cold. And when he opened the door at the foot of the stairs
he heard the sound of surreptitious flight above, and he stopped motionless,
his heart and blood as quiet as if turned to stone.
It was his hand that first recovered the power of action, and he raised it and
turned the electric switch, and instantly the light fell across the steep
flight of stairs. But except for this one movement of his hand all else
was halted in him, and he could not put on foot before the other and move up
the stair well, and he could not turn and go.
There is someone up there, he thought. There has
always been someone. All the time I’ve been working on the pipe rack,
someone’s been watching me. But now there was absolute silence in
the attic, and he backed away, hardly knowing that he moved until he came
abruptly against the banister ra
Climax-“Dad!” he called out, but from the warm,
bright world below came only the far sound of American voices and American
laughter from the radio, and he knew that his father was in another country,
and that his own voice, calling could not be heard. And if I ran
and asked him to come up, he thought he would see the pipe rack; and
he held his breathe in his teeth, and returned to the open door and mounted
into the cold. In the shadows hung the carnival masks, their faces as varied as
those of living men and women, but no other sign of flesh and blood was there.
In the morning he questioned his father. “Do you remember the squirrel that
used to climb up the vine to the balcony?” the boy Asked as his father buttoned
his olive-drab tunic over in the hall, ”I used to put
out nuts for him,” he said. ”Do you think he might have moved into the
attic for the winter?”
2. Identify the exact setting of the story (time and place of action.)
This story takes place during winter
in
3. List and provide evidence of character traits for Jeff and Col.
Wheeler
Jeff-
The colonel’s son was twelve the winter he started to make the pipe rack for his father. He was a handsome, dark-eyed boy, with a voice as high and clear as a choir-boy’s and a quickness, a nimbleness, about him that was in his mind as well as in his flesh. He had a skill for carpentry and mechanics in his fingers, and he could shoot game as expertly as any man his father hunted with.
Col. Wheeler-
4. Identify the type (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory) and importance of each image:
a. the wilderness- the wilderness symbolizes being alone.
b. the reading lamp- Jeff sees the soldier under the reading lamp.
c. the attic- the attic is the place he finds the soldier. It is now the soldiers home.
d. the masks- The masks symbolize Jeff’s Past. “I used to collect masks once,” Jeff said, as if dismissing the far time of his youth.
5. Explain the significance of the following symbols: (Hint: when you unpack a symbol, first determine what the object literally does, then look at that object's qualities and make the connection between the object does in the story, and what it means as a symbol. Ex: lions--predators, courageous, fierce, strong, king of the jungle, etc=a person who desires or has strength, is bold, is unafraid, etc.)
a. the wilderness - Big,
alone, quiet, mysterious- The unknown soldier is in the attic is mysterious
b. the
attic – This is in Jeff’s
house and now the soldiers home. The place Jeff is building the pipe rack, the place that hold the masks.
c. the fox
mask,
d. the devil's mask
e. the cat
mask
f. the reading lamp -
g. Jeff's mother's empty bedroom
6. Theme: Create a sentence that explains what the story seems to reveal about the following ideas:
a. Maturity -
b. Fear -
c. Rules/Breaking the rules -