ENG 1302: The Store in Which the Justice of the Peace’s Court was Sitting Smelled of Cheese: Composition II Assignment, UHD, Singapore

Assignment Details:

“Barn Burning” by William Faulkner

The store in which the justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish – this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one.

The smells and senses just a little of fear because of most of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; our! mine and his both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is because his father had said no word yet:

“But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?”

“I told you. The hog got into my corn. I caught it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that would hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it I gave him enough wire to patch up his pen. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled on to the spool in his yard.

I told him he could have the hog when he paid me a dollar pound fee. That evening a nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. He was a strange nigger. He said, ‘He says to tell you wood and hay kin burn.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘That what he say to tell you,’ the nigger said. ‘Wood and hay kin burn.’ That night my barn burned. I got the stock out but I lost the barn.”

1. Abner Snopes’ barn burning is one of the causes of the problems his family and others endure in William Faulkner’s Barn Burning, but what are the effects of his behavior on the family, others in the story, and Discuss one or all of the people affected by Abner’s barn burning in your essay response. Explain.
2. How does Alice Walker’s Everyday Use, William Faulkner’s Barn Burning, Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, or Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants utilize imagery to help readers visualize the story? Explain. Select one or two stories for your essay
3. How does the point of view improve the understanding of either Alice Walker’s Everyday Use, Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, William Faulkner’s Barn Burning, or Chopin’s The Story of an Hour? Select one or two stories for your essay response.
4. How does the setting choice improve either Faulkner’s Barn Burning, Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, or Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants? Select one or two stories for your essay response.
5. What does symbolism add to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Faulkner’s Barn Burning, Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, or Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants? Select one or two for your essay response.
6. Discuss irony (verbal, dramatic, and or situational) in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. How does Jackson use irony, verbal, dramatic, and or situational, to illustrate more profound occurrences in each
7. Upon re-reading Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, foreshadowing can be seen from start to How does Shirley Jackson use foreshadowing to give readers’ subtle nudges of what is to happen in the story. Is Jackson’s use of foreshadowing effectively?
8. Alice Walker’s Everyday Use, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and William Faulkner’s Barn Burning deliver serious thought-provoking themes. Explore one or two stories where the theme of themes is especially