Read back through the story again. Find a phrase or sentence that has HUGE POTENTIAL.Some things to look for in a "quote with potential" are:
- vivid, specific and specialized language (Remember how we explored the words "molting" and "carnivorous" that Atwood used to describe the moose? Remember to ask yourself, "why would an author SAY it THIS way?")
- images that repeat (remember the "pinky" stones that reappear in several places?)
"She has gone over and over it in her mind since, so many times that the first, real shout has been obliterated, like a footprint trampled by other footprints" ( Margaret Atwood 112-113).
ReplyDeleteThe words obliterated and trampled are both destructive words. In this quote, the shout and footprints were erased. However, their connotations may be referring to something else. Obliterated means to remove all traces while trampled means to tread crushingly. When a sound is ceased, there is no trace. When a footprint is trampled upon by others, it can be difficult to distinguish. In this way, these two words may have been used to foreshadow Lucy's disappearance. She was gone without a trace.
Because the camp has a hostile feeling, I think that this quote is somehow a note from the author that something is going to be erased. As it turns out, it was Lucy. The harsh destructive words Atwood used to describe the lack of trail complements the carnivorous molting moose head. Among other things, this quote contributes to the hostile feeling and warns what the camp does; erase.
"Once she loved the campfire, the flickering of light on the ring of faces, the sound of the fake tom-toms, heavy and fast like a scared heartbeat." Page 107
ReplyDeleteTo me, this sentence sounds like it is trying to set a mood of the story. With the use of words like "a scared heartbeat," it seems like the author is trying to get the reader to almost get "creeped out" by this quote to set a nervous and scary setting.
I had the same quote as Christian.
ReplyDelete"She has gone over and over it in her mind since, so many times that the first, real shout has been obliterated, like a footprint trampled by other footprints" ( Atwood 112-113).
A definition I got of trampled was "to act in a harsh, domineering, or cruel manner, as if treading roughly." I think this could be a metaphore for how Lucy had started to tread her life wrongly, and something was bound to go wrong. It also sounds as if the screams are silenced and not brought to attention.
"It would be quite a dive off here-Lucy"
ReplyDelete"You'd have to be nuts-Lois"
"Why?-Lucy"
112
I chose this little conversation between Lucy and Lois right before Lucy has gone missing because this conversation could be a key part in an investigation. From this quote we get an idea that Lucy has the feeling that she wants to jump off the big cliff into the water, but it seems very dangerous. To me, it seems like the author is giving us several ideas that could of happened to Lucy during the time Lois saw her.
"The muscles of her sore arms are like pings, like rubber bands breaking." (Atwood, 109). The definition of ping is "a short high-pitched resonant sound". This reminds me of when right before Lucy went missing she made a quick scream that seemed to stop short. The rubber bands breaking could refer to a bond between Lucy and Lois breaking. Once Lucy went missing, Lois felt empty and her "rubber band" was no longer put together.
ReplyDelete"Lois can still remember all the waords to 'My Darling Clementine,' and to 'My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,' with acting-out gestures: a rippling of the hands for 'the ocean,' two hands together under teh cheek for 'lies.' She will never be able to forget them, which is a sad thought."
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked back in the story I noticed this part. Atwood put this here on purpose. It shows that Lois will never forget the hand-signals for the ocean or lies because of Lucy. Atwood chose these two words for a reason. Lucy lies in Camp Manitou. She is physically lying down because she's dead, and figuratively because her spirit lies over the camp. Atwood also chose ocean, because it is thought that Lucy jumped or fell into the ocean. These words will always have meaning to Lois.
"Thsi year Lucy is different again: slower. more languorous. She is no longer interested in sneaking around after dark, purloining cigarettes from the counselor, dealing in black-market candy bars. Sh is pensive, and hard to wake up in the mornings. She doesn't like her stepfather, but she doesn't want to live with her real father either, who has a new wife....She has a boyfriend, who is sixteen and works as a gardener's assistant....She wants to run away from home" (pg. 106)
ReplyDeleteThis part of the short story sticks out to me because it kind of foreshadows what is going to happen, Lucy disappears. She doesn't want to live with either of her parents and she is forbidden to see her boyfriend. She wants to run away from home because nothing is how she wants it to be. She doesn't like her stepfather, but doesn't want to live with her real father and thinks her mother is having an affair with a doctor. She doesn't have anyone supporting her or there for her.
"Lois tried to get comfortable in her sleeping bag, which smelled of musty storage and of earlier campers, a stale salty sweetness. She curled herself up, with her sweater rolled up under her head for a pillow and her flashlight inside her pillow so it wouldn't roll away. The muscles of her sore arms were making small pings, like rubber bands breaking." (page 110)
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked back at this part of the story, I thought about how Lois never got over Lucy disappearing and I interpreted this quote in the same way. It described how uncomfortable sleeping on the landscape was and to me this represents Lois being uncomfortable, unsettled with what happened to Lucy. Also, "stale, salty, sweetness" could refer to the sour taste that was left in everyone's mouth, especially Lois' after Lucy disappeared. Although the whole passage may not seem to have significant meaning, to me it does.
"This was to be a long one, into the trackless wilderness, as Cappie put it." (page 100)
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked back into the story, this quote stood out at me right away. The word "trackless" stood out the most. Trackless means not making or leaving a track and the author chooses to use this word on purpose. This foreshadows Lucy's disappearance because when she disappears nobody is able to track her down. Shes gone without a trace. This is significant because it is a clue that she will never be found.
"She was tired a lot, as if she was living not one life but two: her own, and another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized-the life of what would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and disappeared from time." (117)
ReplyDeleteI feel that thiss quote has some potential because from this point of Lois's view, she feels that after the camp, her life fell apart. Even though she got married and had kids, her husband died and her two boys grew up and moved on, leaving her to tend to her wounded thoughts. To me this shows that all this time she has been beating herself up about Lucy's disappearance, and that the life she was living was not her life at all, it wasn't the one that she wanted. Although she wanted an explanation to how Lucy disappeared, her other life, she new that she would never be able to get the solid answer she desired. "...shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized" seems to pop out at me, only because Lois really cared for Lucy, so wen Lucy escaped from the picture, everything turned upside down.
She lived her real life, but never really lived it; she felt that without Lucy, the life that she had once wanted is a meaningless gesture, one that she will never get a chance to live.
Lucy and Lois are taliking as they lay on the ground looking at the sky when Lucy said "It would be nice not to go back" when she is asked were she says "to Chicago" This is on page 110.
ReplyDeleteThis is signifigant because it shows that Lucy did'nt like her life in Chicago and that she would rather be in the woods forever than go back to Chicago, and if you look at the story later when Lois' pictures are a symbol as a place for Lucy and that she is in the woods forever and will never have to go back to her life in Chicago that she so much hated
"She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy. You can't see her exactly, but she's there, in behind the pink stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff she is hidden by the clutch of fallen rocks towards the bottom, in the one of the river shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe. In the yellow autumn woods she's behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees, over beside the blue sliver of pond; but if you walked into the picture and found the tree, it would be the wrong one, because the right one would be further on." (page 118)
ReplyDeleteI feel that this quote has some potential to it because it shows how deeply Lois feels of guilt and longing. It makes her realize that whenever she looks into the pictures, that even though she feels like she sees Lucy she really doesn't because she never put enough effort in to go and find her. I think that Atwood wrote this quote with such vivid detail was because she wanted to show how deeply Lois feels about losing Lucy; about not having solved the mystery of solving where Lucy was. To show that everywhere she was, Lois should have looked more.
"Out on the lake there were two loons, calling to each other in their insane, mournful voices. At the time it did not sould like grief. It was just background" (page 110)
ReplyDeleteI chose this quote because not only are these two sentences giving the setting of what is going on, but it tells of what is to come. This passage says that at this time, the loons were only just background; meaning that to the girls, it was just "another noise in the woods". But, as it also says in this quote: "At the time it did not sound like grief" I believe that this means that something is going to happen in the future, which has something to do with someone grieving another. I believe that this has big potential because with this, you can layout an entire ending to a story, even a beginning.
"They are pictures of convulted tree truncks on an island of pink wave-smoothed stone, with more islands behind; of a lake with rough, bright, sparsely wooded cliffs; of a vivid river shore with a tangle of bush and two beached canoes, one red, one gray; of a yellow autumn woods with ice-blue gleam of a pond half-seen through the interlaced branches"(Atwood 100).
ReplyDeleteI think that in these photos she sees what it was like when she went to camp. They have canoes and cliff and pink island. All of these were in the end when Lucy disappeared. They all remind her and do not let her forgot of Lucy because she is still alive by Lois's means and she did not die that day but Lois did. She is now old and does not want to remember anything but she should enjoy life and not take it for granted. She went through a experience as a kid she never wanted to go through again but she did again with her husband dying.
This quote is describing Cappie.
ReplyDelete"Her head jutted forward, jigging like a chicken's as she strode around the camp, clutching notebooks and checking things in them. She was like their minister in church: both of them smiled a lot and wereanxious because they wanted things to go well; they both had the same overwashed skins and stringy necks."(103)
I believe that ths quote is somewhat foreshadowing the upcoming events. I believe this because they said she was very anxious and always wanted things to go well and then troughout the story she calmed downand things started to go downhill with the start of Lucy disappearing. Then she totallylost her coolwhen she tryedto convince Lois that she ahdkilled her own best friend.
Page 99 "the ivy pushing its muscular little suckers into the brickwork" I thought this quote had HUGE potential because it had a very descriptive phrase "muscular little suckers" that didnt sound like real life ivy to me at all. It made it sound as if the ivy was evil like in a horrible horror movie or something. Then when I thought about it more it seemed as if Lois was almost saying that she was trapped in her house with this ivy all over the place
ReplyDelete"Out on the lake there were two loons, caling to each other in their insane, mournful voices. At the time it did not sound like grief. It was just background."(page 110)
ReplyDeleteThis quote uses descriptive words like insane and mournful to express the way the loons are calling to each other. At the same time the author states it is only in the background as if it is insignificant. The word insane seems to be used out of place, it could be away of connecting the loons to the way Lucy feels. Because of that the whole quote could be a metaphor for Lucy's and Lois' relationship throughout the story.
i would post a quote but why should i when i feel the phrase with the most potential is the title. I know we sort of talked about this in class but i want to assess it more. The title death by landscape can give you many different thoughts, especially before you read the story. However once you read the story the title becomes a very huge part of the story. I feel the word "Landscape" in the title has to do with the place in which the death of Lucy took place, and also the pictures of the landscapes that Lois collects throughout the years. The title has so much potential because it is like putting pieces of a puzzle together, and it really has countless numbers of foreshadowing towards the story.
ReplyDelete"It would be nice not to go back" when she is asked were she says "to Chicago" said Lucy "I hate it there." This is on page 110.
ReplyDeleteThis is right before Lois asks about Lucy’s boyfriend and how Lucy does not respond. I found this important to the story because it set off a warning to me that maybe her boyfriend had something to do with her disappearing. Maybe her boyfriend kidnapped her. The author adds this I think to make the reader think otherwise in her relationship at home with her family and everyone there.
"...the trees themselves are hardly trees; they are currents of energy, charged with violent color."(pg. 118)
ReplyDeleteThe word current means a flow - from one object to another. Energy is what is being transferred. Perhaps the energy being transferred is going to Lucy. The energy itself is charged with violent colors. The colors of the energy made Lucy disappear - whether she was killed or committed suicide.
"Spindly balsam and spruce trees grow to either side, the lake is blue fragments to the left."
ReplyDeletePage 111
This is right before Lois and Lucy have lunch on their hiking trip. This has significance to the story, because this sets the reader into a calm, peaceful mood. The choice of words, balsam, spruce, describe the type of trees, and fragments is a perfect choice to describe the lake. These words paint a descriptive picture of the landscape in the reader's mind. I believe that the author chose to use the words in this way to grasp the reader's mind in a different, more abstract way than they might be used to.
I think that Evan has a really good point, and I think that the author did try to subconsciensly get readers to think deeper into the name of the title. So good point Evan!
ReplyDeleteOn page 105, Atwood desribes Lucy in Lois' point of view, "Lucy was so blond, with translucent skin and large blue eyes like a doll's," when reading this, i get the image that Lucy is almost like an angel, she seems to be almost perfect in Lois' eyes. This could be a way that Atwood foreshaddows Lucy's death. I also believe this makes readers get the feeling that Lois really admired Lucy.
"Back there, the camp has vanished behind the first long point of rock and rough trees. Lois feels as if an invisible rope has broken. They're floating free, on their own, cut loose. Beneath the canoe the lake goes down, deeper and colder than it was a minute before." Page 109
ReplyDeleteThis quote really stuck out to me mostly because of the line about cutting loose. This shows that they are no longer attached to the camp, because the camp has vanished in the distance. I see this as foreshadowing because they are no longer tied to the camp, Lucy goes missing. This quote also is very interesting because the adjectives get stronger. "Down, deeper and colder" all adjectives showing the environment is getting more intense, leading to action.
" There was a moon, and a movement of the trees. In the sky there were stars, layers of stars that went down and down."p.110
ReplyDeleteThis quote seemed to have potential because it seems to serve as a metaphor for what happened to Lucy. The moon serves as Lucy when she vanished in the trees, and she also represents the stars that "went down and down", referring to her possibly falling off the cliff.
"This was to be a long one, into the trackless wilderness, as Cappie put it." (page 100)
ReplyDeleteThinking back through the story, to me this is a key quote. This foreshadows the trackless path that will have led to Lucy’s disappearance. Trackless means having no precise pathway, which is where Lucy is lost now. Also the phrase “a long one” sticks out to me. When I think of something as long, I think “never ending.” The story concludes with Lucy lost on a trackless never ending path.