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Copywork
About This Passage
At the chapter's climax, Poe builds dread and then delivers it: Parker's 'air of self-possession,' the narrator's foreknowledge — 'before he opened his lips my heart told me what he would say' — and at last the terrible proposal itself. Copying these three sentences shows how a writer withholds and then releases a horror, the calm, plain syntax making the unthinkable land with full weight.
As soon as she was entirely gone, Parker turned suddenly toward me with an expression of countenance which made me shudder. There was about him an air of self-possession which I had not noticed in him...
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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 gives the friends 'indescribable comfort,' but on their empty stomachs it soon flings Peters, Parker, and Augustus into a violent delirium. Explain what Poe suggests about relief and rescue in extremity by giving the same gift two such opposite effects. Use details from the chapter.
- When a second ship steers away after seeming to bear straight down on them, Augustus refuses to believe it, mistaking floating sea-weed for the ship's boat and trying to throw himself upon it. Why might Augustus cling to that hope more desperately than the others seem to? Use details from the chapter to support your view.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Impossible to bear or endure.
Item 2
A lessening or easing of pain or distress.
Item 3
Made weak and feeble.
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Critical Thinking
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