Pick only FIVE passages This is a closed book test. Write a developed blurb about FIVE passages. Give the title of the story, author’s name, and possibly which character is speaking. Explain what is happening and how passage is relevant to the main ideas in story. Be comprehensive. Passage 1 True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story. Passage 2 So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either:…and he springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and an instant later, two more shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying “Pap! Pap!”, running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, “Father! Father!” Passage 3 So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?” But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do. Passage 4 When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature. Passage 5 But something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon. “My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! For to thee is this world given.” And maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did [he] grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate, that he seemed to fly along the forest-path, rather than to walk or run. Passage 6 Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away. . . Passage 7 The original paraphernalia . . . had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. . . .The black box grew shabbier each year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained. Passage 8 “…I’ve already paid for this, coronel. I’ve paid for it many times over. Everything was taken away from me. They punished me in many different ways. I’ve spent over forty years hiding like a leper, with the constant fear that I’d be killed at any moment. I don’t deserve to die like this, coronel. Let me be, at least, so that God may forgive me. Don’t kill me!”
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