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Copywork
About This Passage
Alone on the brig, the narrator confesses that hunger could drive him 'to any lengths,' then, knife in hand, tries to eat the leather trunk and can only chew and spit it. Copying these two sentences shows how Poe moves from a blunt confession to a precise, almost clinical act, marking the chapter's moral danger and the depth of the friends' starvation.
The gnawing hunger which I now experienced was nearly insupportable, and I felt myself capable of going to any lengths in order to appease it. With my knife I cut off a small portion of the leather tr...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: how the friends fail to force the locked store-room and find only a bottle of wine, how the wine comforts and then deranges them, how the narrator chews leather and revives his companions by plunging them in the sea, how a second ship bears down and then steers 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
- After Peters cannot force the store-room door, Parker cannot even reach it, and Augustus cannot try because of his wounded arm, the task of diving for food falls to the narrator. Explain what this sequence shows about the condition of the whole group, and why the narrator is the one left to attempt their 'common deliverance.' Use details from the chapter.
- The bottle of port-wine first brings the friends 'indescribable comfort,' yet soon throws Peters, Parker, and Augustus into a dangerous 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.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A state of dull, heavy tiredness and inaction.
Item 2
A confused, raving state of mind.
Item 3
Extremely thin and wasted from hunger or illness.
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Critical Thinking
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