At the end of the course, students will choose one of their previous journal entries from the second half of the class and develop it into a longer, more formal writing assignment.
If they choose from the “Respond,” “Research,” or “Analyze” categories, their final draft should have a clear introduction with a thesis statement. Each body paragraph should have a topic sentence, evidence from the literature, and a connection to their thesis. Their conclusion should wrap up their main idea and restate their main points. Students should make sure to follow the original prompt carefully.
Students MUST cite from the poems/stories themselves in their essay and cite them properly in MLA or APA style.
If a student chooses to use one of their “Create” journals, their final draft should follow the prompt closely, developing their original idea further than their first 500-word journal. It should be carefully and correctly written and should meet the required word count. If a student used this option for their Midterm Essay, they may NOT use a “Create” option for their Final Essay.
The final draft of the Final Essay should be 1200-1500 words, written in formal, edited,
Standard English, and proofread for spelling and grammar errors before it is submitted.
Comparative literary analysis of In the Lake of the Woods and The Painted Drum
Both Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods and Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum take a different approach to the same question: What happens to a person, and their people, when something terrible happens? Neither novel is monochoral; instead, it prefers a combination of fragmented timelines, shifting narrators, and symbolic objects. But the two authors used the broken form in different ways. O’Brien says trauma cannot be known or closed, and Erdrich says story and ritual can heal what’s been broken even after a devastating loss. Through reading these novels, two conflicting views of how people and their communities survive what ought not to be survivable emerge.
O’Brien’s novel is constructed on unreliable radicalism. The Vietnam massacre of John Wade and the disappearance of his wife are never explained; the narrator interrupts the plot with “Evidence” and “Hypothesis” chapters and open confessions of ignorance. The narrator of the book reflects on whether “we so cynical, so sophisticated as to write off even the chance of happy endings?” before admitting that it is all “It’s all hypothesis, beginning to end” (O’Brien 240). The theme is this uncertainty: trauma resists closure, so not-knowing is the point. The post-fixation of Wade’s mirror tricks, based on his childhood practice ‘in front of a stand-up mirror’, personifies a man who has spent his life learning to make things disappear, even his guilt. The disjointed narration, the idea that we cannot ever fully know another person, becomes the same idea.
The Painted Drum novel is also nonlinear and multivocal, as Erdrich’s several narrators shift from Faye to the drum as it is passed through time and into the oral history of the Ojibwe people. O’Brien’s fragmentation dramatizes despair, while Erdrich’s structure dramatizes connection. The drum is a “living thing,” “must be fed,” “cures and kills,” and “related to all other drums,” and people/objects remain connected generationally (Erdrich 33). Faye’s grief of losing her sister and of the drum being taken away starts to radiate outward to Bernard, Shaawano, and the Ojibwe community to which the drum once belonged. The stories are arranged within each other and passed from one person to another, just like the drum. Storytelling and meaning are communal, and stories can heal what they have torn.
Both novels are partially narrated, the former stating that the truth about trauma is difficult to come by, and the latter relying on a central symbol: the mirror and the lake in one, the drum in the other. O’Brien’s symbolism tends to recede, Erdrich’s to return.
I really like Erdrich’s theme more. While O’Brien’s confession that we can never know another person well is an honest one, it is also very paralyzing. Erdrich’s recognition of the same darkness in such things as addiction, death, and violence does not fail to be accompanied by the conviction that ritual and community can repair, if imperfectly. The Edrich’s approach offers a better representation of how people grieve, not by finding certainty, but by finding relationships that carry them forward, until the next generation and so on, until the drum is carried along.
Works Cited
Erdrich, Louise. The Painted Drum: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2009.
O’Brien, Tim. In the Lake of the Woods. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.