- What are some of the different effects that the death of Brother Bobby has on the various members of the Shandy household?
- Corporal Trim and Sir Walter Shandy carry on two parallel orations on the subject of death. How are their speeches similar or different?
- What's the deal with whiskers?
- What various things do you learn about Uncle Toby throughout the reading assigned for tomorrow? What sort of a person is he? What particular clues do you get to his character?
- What do you learn about Mrs. Shandy in the reading?
- What are relations like between masters/mistresses and servants in the Shandy household?
- What further information do you get about the narrator's writing process, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions?
- What's the point of the paragraph of near-nonsense on p. 335 (V.xv)?
- On p. 339 (V.xvii), young Tristram is inadvertently circumcised. How does it happen? Who, according to the narrative, is most to blame, and why? What do the reactions of the various characters to this event tell you about them?
- (For what it's worth, the asterisks in the big paragraph on p. 339 correspond precisely to the number of letters in the words that have been omitted. Who can guess what "******* ***" and "**** *** ** *** ******" stand for?)
Deadline: Wednesday (2/9), 1pm.
7 comments:
The death of Brother Bobby has very different effects on the different members of the family. I see Uncle Toby being very concerned with what he reads in the letter. Bobby's father at first asks many questions such as what Toby means when he says Bobby is gone and whether he was sick, but once he gets these answers, he doesn't seem overly concerned. He merely takes it as he would any other news, that it is nothing extremely important but something that can be heard once and then not worried about anymore. Toby attempts to make his brother see the importance of the information in the letter, but his efforts are futile when his brother comes up with excuses about how death comes to everybody in their own time. His attitude towards his son's death is very unlike the way I would expect a father to act towards the loss of a son.
Bobby's mother on the other hand is even more upset than Toby is. Though most of the information about her comes from those who work for her, such as Susannah, we are able to find out she is extremely distressed and this makes the staff very upset about the death as well. Bobby's death permeated through the entire household affecting the members of his family in different ways.
On page 339, five-year-old Tristram is circumcised when a window falls on him. Susannah was distracted and complaining about Tristram while trying to work. She lifted up the window with one hand and set Tristram in the window seat. Then she turned away and kept talking. The next minute, the window smacked down and... the rest is in the text. Tristram does not blame Susannah or anyone for that matter. He muses idly about the fact that their house was made with shoddy workmanship, Susanah was distracted, and Tristram did not care too much. He didn't want to call a doctor and said there was barely any blood. The doctor, though made a huge fuss. He seems to be the character who cared the most about Tristram. Susannah thought of herself, wanting to flee. Uncle Toby let Susannah work for him, but Tristram did not mention his or any other characters' reactions. They don't seem to care much at all, though. Tristram's own lack of emotion about the situation kind of frightens me. I would expect it to be a much bigger deal for him.
I would like to guess what the asterisks stand for and why I think it’s appropriate. I think the first set, "******* ***", stands for “chamber pot”. The second set, "**** *** ** *** ******", I think stands for “p*ss out of the window”. These two phrases make perfect sense, and explain why Tristram was in the situation that led to his circumcision. At first I didn’t think it would really be something so vulgar, but then I remembered how this was considered controversial back in the day. The words were not actually typed out in the book, so I thought hinting at something of that nature seems strangely appropriate for the book.
My interpretation of Chapter 39 is similar to what Jillian came up with, but with focus on some other aspects of it. For instance, I feel like Tristram is so calm about it because his penis is small. I gather this from such lines as, "I was five years old -- Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family." This certainly refers to the sash that came crashing down, but I also took it for it's contemporary meaning. Susannah thinks Tristram's penis was entirely severed by the accident, but in reality they were small enough (due to him being a child as well as my interpretation of the innuendo) that it wasn't a truly big deal and he ended up being simply circumcised. I generally shy away from such explanations of scenes, but I feel that the innuendo suggests it too strongly to ignore.
While I'm mostly dumbfounded by what's going on in Chapter XV, my first thought was that Tristram was drunk off his rocker and blabbering about music and death. Another senario I imagined was some sort of street performance. The way the musical diddles and dums are mixed in with someone seeming calling out to a person or an audience. "Do you know whether my fiddle's in tune or no?" sounds like a question to a single listener and a possible audience is hinted at by "There is nothing in playing before good judges" and "Your worships and your reverences love musick--and God has made you all with good ears" (335).
And the final paragraph I take to be Tristram talking to his own listener about listening to such good music and how it fills him with "joys and hopes, and puts the most hidden springs of [his] heart into motion" (335). Bobby's death is a heavy thing that few in the Shandy household seem to be handling or mourning the healthiest way, so maybe this visit to a street or public performing musician is a Tristram's best means of escape.
Hah, I take back my interpretation. It's definitely wrong.
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