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Copywork
About This Passage
Poe measures the friends' ruin not by numbers but by recognition: the narrator cannot 'believe them really the same individuals' he knew 'but a few days before.' Copying this paragraph teaches the periodic inversion ('Had I met them on shore...') and the careful gradation that ranks each man's decline, and shows how a writer makes the body's destruction the visible ground of the moral collapse that ends the chapter.
I never saw before, nor wish to see again, human beings so utterly emaciated as Peters and Augustus. Had I met them on shore in their present condition I should not have had the slightest suspicion th...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: how the friends fail to force the locked store-room and bring up only a bottle of wine, how the wine comforts and then deranges them while the narrator stays clear, how he chews leather and revives the others by plunging them in the sea, how a second ship bears down and then turns away, and how Parker, at the end, proposes that one of them die so the others may live. Then choose the moment you find most decisive and explain why.
Discussion Questions
- The bottle of port-wine first brings the friends 'indescribable comfort,' yet soon drives Peters, Parker, and Augustus into a violent delirium, while the narrator, immersed just after drinking, is spared. Explain what Poe suggests about help received in extremity when the same gift brings both comfort and danger. Use details from the chapter.
- When the second ship steers away after seeming to bear straight down on them, Augustus refuses to accept the loss, mistaking floating sea-weed for the ship's boat and trying to cast himself upon it. What does Augustus's delusion suggest about the mind under repeated disappointment, and why might he break where the narrator does not? Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A state of heavy, sluggish inaction and indifference.
Item 2
Failing to produce the intended effect; useless.
Item 3
Acts of foolishness or witlessness.
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Critical Thinking
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