Tomorrow morning, before you begin your initial work on your final essay and annotated bibliography, we will revisit Stephen King‘s “Strawberry Spring” and discuss the answers to your collaborative exercise on the story.
For that exercise, I asked you to determine whether you could identify any details that indicate why the narrator may have murdered any of his victims. Although there is no indication that the narrator knew Gale Cermann, Adelle Parkins, or Marsha Curran, he did know Ann Bray, which he reveals after he tells the readers that she was editor of the school newspaper: “In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth I had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date–turned down on both counts” (275).
I also asked you to identify words and phrases that illustrate how the story is not only a horror story but also a commentary on war, the Vietnam War in particular, and the Vietnam era. Some of the words and phrases you may have identified include these:
- (ice) sculpture of Lyndon Johnson . . . “cried melted tears” (269)
- Civil War cannons (269, 275, 282)
- the dove “lost its frozen feathers” (269)
- the fog (269, 270, 272, 277, 279, 280)
- “who had been drafted” (273)
- SDS (276), Students for a Democratic Society
- quagmire (277)
- “a series of draft protests and a sit-in” (281)
- “well-known napalm manufacturer . . . holding interviews” (281)
In addition to those questions on your assignment sheet, I asked you to try to identify the two literary allusions in King’s story. The first is an allusion to J.R.R. Tolkein‘s The Lord of the Rings trilogy: “You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo or Sam go hurrying past” (269). The second is an allusion to a poem by Carl Sandburg, titled–perhaps unsurprisingly–“The Fog” (272).
Next Up
In class tomorrow, you will complete an exercise as part of your initial work on your final essay and annotated bibliography. Details TBA.
Jane Lucas 