Monday, March 14, 2016

Quotes as Plot

My prewriting for The Poisonwood Bible was fairly straightforward; as I read through the book again, I underlined all of the quotes that dealt with paradox, contrast, or balance. I then took all of these quotes and rearranged some of them to try and give a summary of the plot or theme of the book. Here's how it went:

"Kikongo is a language that is sung rather than spoken; each word means many different things depending on how it is said."

"If I'd had the foggiest idea... we brought all the wrong things."

"My father thought he was preaching the absolute truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible."

"When I'm gone, I'll still be there in the tree, and I'll see you, but you won't see me."

"I came home that afternoon and realized I no longer believed in God... that is my own mantra: 'Evol's dog! Dog ho!'"

"BeƩne, you are mistaken... such a thing cannot exist."

"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."

"That last breath, that ended the sentence of her life, was a semicolon rather than a period... the semicolon started somewhere around her heart."

"When I brought the table out with my baby on it, it felt right to bring everything else out with it."

"The spirits ask "Mother, May I?" while their mothers try to eat the dirt off the graves."

"The death of something living is the price of our survival."

These are just some of the quotes I found in the book, but the story they depict is really haunting if you think about it. It's given me a clear vision of what I could write and analyze for my paper.

As for the social aspect, I talked with a lot of my friends (a few of which were my teachers in high school) about the Poisonwood Bible, and just about every single one of them rates it as one of their favorite books of all time. We talked a bit about its critical tones towards the American interference in the Congo, as well as the many symbols and themes that are introduced in the most innocuous ways, such as the theme of nothing being what it seems introduced through discussion of the language spoken in the Congo.

2 comments:

  1. I love how straightforward this is. I feel like a lot of times writers will look almost TOO deeply into a text to try and support their ideas, while you were really able to give us a pretty clear view of this book just from a few quotes. I feel like it's something that gets overlooked.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I also liked the quote summary. It would probably make more sense to me if I had read the book, but thematically it seemed to move forward. I think it is beneficial to simplify at the beginning of the writing process.

    ReplyDelete