LCSChapter 7, 8

Books, Love and Lice

Vocab words

• belligerent• redolent• profound• limbo• blather• somnanbulate

• minute• incapacitated• precarious• predicament

DictionPicture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, havin g heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakenig desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.Comment on the contrast, adjectives, perspective and diction of this sentence

DictionPicture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakenig desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.Comment on the contrast, adjectives, perspective and diction of this sentence

a stab of jealousy, a bitter wrenching emotion I had never felt before ( 58)

Why does the narrator have these feelings?Is this justified?How would you describe his feelings about the LCS? Think of the novel and use quotes.

In spite of my complete ignorance of that distant land called France . . . Ursule’s story rang as true as if it had been about my neighbours” [p. 57]. 1.1 What is it that enables him to identify so strongly with characters and situations he has never experienced? 1.2What does his experience suggest about the power of literature?1.3 In what ways does Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress exert a similar power on its readers?

• After the two boys read the book, they have two differtn reactions.

• Explain how they each react. (detail)• What does this imply about them? (..you

might want to come back and add to this later!)

“Perhaps that is why she laughed afterwards, a laugh so piercing, so wild and echoing so far and wide that even the birds took wing in fright”

What does this reaction reveal about the Little Chinese Seamstress? How is this similar to what we as reader has come to learn of her in previous chapters?

• What did Luo want to do to make the seamstress more refined?

• How is this different than what Luo felt in the first few chapters? (Quote!)

• Is what Luo intends to do a benevolent or self-serving act? What evidence from the story supports your analysis

Diction

“ When shé’d finished reading she sat there quite still, open-mouthed. Your coat was resting on the flat of her hands, the way a sacred object lies in the palms of the pious.” (62)

• This fellow Balzac is a wizard....[h]e touched the head of this mountain girl with an invisible finger and she was transformed, carried away in a dream....makde her feel good , and also more intelligent”(62)

• Discuss. How does reading/hearing the book affect the LCS? How does this deffer form Luo and the narrator?