Wednesday and Thursday

We involved ourselves in a gallery walk, spent time on our Multi-Genre Essay, and checked-in with the teacher on incomplete assignments.

See yesterday for copies of handouts for first required writing.

Mr. Austin Wallace wrote a sample of what a character study can look like. See below or click here for link:

Austin Wallace
American Literature
2 March 2015
Loss of Past in All The Pretty Horses
In All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, the protagonist John Grady Cole travels from southwest Texas into Mexico with his best friend Lacey Rawlins. After his mother sells his family’s ranch, John Grady is left without a purpose in life because he always imagined that he would be a cowboy and rancher; therefore, he rides into Mexico in search of the life he cannot seem to have in Texas. The sixteen year old faces several hardships in Mexico; even though he is guided by his own principals, events rarely turn out the way he desires, as the forces around him are much greater than he is. Over the course of this coming of age novel, John Grady represents a loss of past because not only does he become a man who is aware of the ways of the world, but he also experiences the dying of the west as he knows it.
As the novel progresses, the reader begins to understand that John Grady is different than the other characters in the novel in many ways. Even Perez, the leader of the Mexican prison, says to John Grady: “You are the oveja negra, no? The black sheep?” (191). John Grady has many qualities which are not seen in other characters; one of the most noticeable is his hope, and his failure to realize the evil of the world around him. Here, one sees how others view John Grady—as a young man who has no quite learned the harsh realities of the world. However, he begins to understand that he has little control over his place in history, and one of the instances where he learns this is at this moment in the Mexican prison.
John Grady feels like the world is changing around him, and he is not prepared to live a life different than the one he always imagined as a cowboy. The narrator tells the reader that John Grady “felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still” (282). This description of what John Grady thinks informs the reader that he still has a purpose in life—he knows he still loves the world—but he feels disconnected from it. He feels this way because he longs for the old, simple days of the west which he sees disappearing around him. After John Grady returns to Texas, he rides his horse on the highway as semi-trucks pass them by (298). In this moment, the reader sees John Grady literally being passed by technology as he rides his horse in his homeland of west Texas. The theme of the loss of past shines through in this moment; John Grady is willingly stuck in the past while the world moves ahead without him. In one of the last scenes in the novel, John Grady witnesses the funeral of a Mexican caretaker of his family, who he calls his abuela. This scene also highlights the theme of loss of past because as he stands over the grave he “held out his hands . . . as if to slow the world that was rushing away” (301). The author directly states that the protagonist is struggling with the changing times in his life. This is significant because it portrays John Grady as a character who experiences the feeling of nostalgia and a loss of the past which he loves.
In his novel, Cormac McCarthy writes about the theme of the loss of past through his protagonist John Grady Cole. We last see the young man riding off into the sunset, reminiscent of a stereotypical western novel. The difference here is that John Grady rides into an unknown world; he is uncertain of his future. McCarthy uses this character as a commentary not only on the loss of a time period in history—the time of cowboys in the west—but also to evoke the experience of the human condition when one’s world is shaken out from under them.