THE ROAD HOME Opening Chapter. Close reading.HOW DOES TREMAIN HOOK THE READER ?Write answers on a separate piece of paper. Use brief quotations to justify each claim.• Write your comment on the opening sentence :

Tells a story of travel. • Lists of natural, rustic and earthy images• Alliteration ‘land he was leaving’ slows pace, dramatises event. Elevates :

JOURNEY and poses qs as to why ? • G’alliteration wild garlic growing green at edge. //dry scorched sunflowers. Lev

pays attention to these pastoral images.• Verbs staring huddled scorched suggesting caution, shock, discord.• Lengthy sentence colon followed by list.

• On the coach seems mundane-immediately places us in socioeconomic context. HEAVY SENSE OF REGRETand APPREHENSION

2. What do we learn here (through description, action and dialogue) about :

• Lev : thoughts, physical appearance, position, limited dialogue, attitude• Lydia : appearance, smells, 1st words , picnic, motivation for English stay• Marina : idyllic, martyr, loved, gentle seen here from Lev’s nostalgic perspective• Stefan : noble or gruff ? link with spirit world. tradition• The past

• From whose point of view is this passage told ? Do we learn anything of the narrator ? Is he/she honest ? intrusive ? reliable ? subjective ?

3rd person limited omniscient. Nonparticipant. Knows Lev’s thoughts only. Reliable but less than with 3rd omniscient as we only see his view. Reports the actions but not thoughts of other characters. Empathy with Lev ? ( ? Does Tremain successfully/ convincingly create a male protagonist ?)Also direct and indirect speech/discourse.Moments of Free indirect discourse : narrator reports thoughts in the style of the character, offering a degree of intimacy.

• Which perspectives are we shown ? Interior ? exterior ? Both ? Panoramic ? Zoom in and out ? (where is the camera being held ?)

• On lev, then zoom out to landscape, Lev, Lydia, other passengers, Lev’s interior monologue.

• Constant shifts, but we continue to see this from Lev’s POV. • Saw his face reflected in the coach window and turned away. (as he ‘saw his own

guilt at still being alive’

• WINDOWS and DOORS : movement between interior and exterior separates AND connects two different spaces : NATURE and CULTURE. Light entering, views inside, limitations of these views remind us that this is a story being told and we can only see what we are allowed to see.

• Doors and frames represent THRESHOLDS that can be crossed into new spaces and worlds.

• Remember he’ll sleep in doorways and take notice of them later.•

5. STRUCTURE and PACE.• Highlight the Verbs used. What do they describe ? Are they all the same tense and

mood ? • VERBS : • He would hold himself apart (future conditional-plans, though the plans are rarely clear

and fixed, as opposed to Lydia’s• Stefan sometimes used to ( past habit)• Lev had slept on a rug (past perfect-past before a more recent past

• Lev chose a seat,//////// She peeled it silently. Past simple (preterit) • Red blankets were given out (passive)• SO CONSTANTLY SHIFTS INTO DIFFERENT PASTS and occasional conditionals for future

plans.• Even so, past of Lev travelling seems immediate as opposed to the past with his family

that he reminisces about • They would be herded back on, resume their old attitudes, arm themselves for the next

hundred miles. • Sleeping upright, he’d lain, , clutched, knew , thought, said TACTILE and KINETIC,

discomfort. • HE IMAGINED, HE THOUGHT ABOUT , he envied…•• In another colour highlight the adjectives used. Again, what patterns emerge ? •• Are the Sentences sophisticated ? complex ? simple ? exclamatory ? imperatives ?

declaratory ?• Begins with PARATACTIC-and so. Compound, but not sophisticated, complex. But by

paragraph 4 sentences become increasingly complex building phrases, thoughts and periodic sentence ‘like a married couple’ foreshadows the relationship, drama , sense of alienation as it’s then juxtaposed with what will happen ‘ when they finally arrived in London…each alone and beginning a new life.

• Lev asks questions, short comments, makes requests, awkwardly practices an unexpected vocab range (stork’s nest…I am legal. but then begins the storytelling and we see that he is comfortable and willing to communicate in his own language.

• Lydia’s first words an apologetic imperative implied ‘no smoking’• Comical misinetrpretation of Bee and bee : ‘to be or not to be’ is also telling. Preempts

the misinterpretation • Which phrases are italicised ? Suggest why ?

If only we were storks. Here the italics REITERATE, HIGHLIGHT and SEPARATE this quotation rendering it significant, resonant.

• Is this fast or slow paced ?

6. IMAGERY. Give examples and suggest the meanings of these.Visual

LIGHT and DARKNESSVivid colours sunflowers, green garlic, Lydia’s face ‘martyrdom of molesFields : usually fertility, growth renewal, but these are scorched sunflowers…

Light : rebirth, renewalDarkness the unknown, despair

Temporal LIFE AND DEATH : to be or not to beTenses shiftingDarkness fallingTowards ten o’clocklifespan of the man on the noteHe would soon be forty-threeHe put her age at about 39Some years agoDoesn’t know if 1223 is UK or Auror time

Age, and broad notions of time important to Lev. Common experiences : awareness of aging, darkness falling but descriptions of past seem immediate and prioritised

Seasonal Winter home/UK Winter and deathHe literally journeys towards the prospect of winter

Olfactory Eggs –sulphurOdour of the on-board lavatory

These visceral instinctive, sensual images allow Lev to return to self and his cultural understanding, and allow him to completely OWN an experience, have full control of his body and eventually find a voice.

Tactile Including scatalogical, (toilet stops etc)

Auditory(+alliteration/assonance, repetition)

Peeling eggs

Clothing Leather jacket, jeans, leather cap pulled over his eyes, old red cotton handkerchief

Food Lydia’s boiled eggs, rye breadVODKA in flask hidden.

Cigarettes :Russian, dented packetRestraint, comfort

Significant cigarettes : moments associated with fond or milestone memories give Lev the power and permission to return to his past

Pain/discomfort

Sitting upright, herded onTheir separate aches and dreams like a married coupleLong agony of it

This will be his plight as immigrant, but very quickly we come to understand that what he leaves behind is a challenging world and he has courageously chosen to seek something better, even if he and his family managed the discomfort

The story opens with a LONG JOURNEY. Implications ? This hero’s journey one of discomfort and apprehension.See handbook for diagram/

• Call to adventure (by whom ?)• Crossing of the first threshold• Helper (s) who ?• Road of trials/tests• Temptress• Atonement, (with brother/ Lydia ?)• Refusal of return• Decsent into hell• Rescue/struggle• Crossing of return threshold• Master of two worlds• Freedom to live

Are there any surprising words or phrases ? Examples of Foreshadowing ? Questions raised ?

Titles are rarely chosen at random. Consider this title and the MANY layers implied by each word.

26th of september The road home

Georges's group is about travelling, freedom : "if only we were storks" because nobody see storks die : as if they didn't die. This reflects Lev's feelings and emotions at the beginning of the book. It introduces the theme of life and death.p37 : "A man may travel far, but his heart may be slow to catch up" : reflects Lev's own situation, however, 'a man' shows the idea is broader. Rose Tremain makes small characters have a personality.p99 : "I don't belong in those places. This is not my world [...] Shit." Lev doesn't belong in England. His heart is not in here. Lev doesn't know wealth, western education, culture.. He is a stranger to this snobbish 'world'. He knows nature (cf. p1)p1 : "Staring out at the land he was leaving" already at p1, Lev longs for his homeland. He belongs in Poland.p250 "Had he had a life once ? Had he ever danced a tango ? Did anyone alive care about the answers to these questions ?" As a polish immigrant worker, nobody in this p137 "When you're old nobody touches you, nobody listens to you, not in this bloody country so that's what I do. I touch and I listen" "I ran out of trees" Talking about the local sawmill, this event starts the novel, it's the trigger, the inciting moment before the book."Oh, I am lonesome from the moon" Lev remembering his late wife singing. The sentence itself is poetic and brings melancholy, nostalgy and desperation to the book.

"He lit a cigarette, disliked the taste of it, and threw it away". The significant cigarettes. Lev has moved on, everything's different. While the cigarettes followed him at every chapter from p1, he changes."He knew he was becoming out of control. ..." Lev has, from the beginning, tried to gain control over his life. He achieved it with the Idea : his restaurant.

:

Epigraph: Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939"How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? 

CHAPTER TITLES:

Significant Cigarettes OPENING SENTENCE:On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the

window, staring out at the land he was leaving: at the fields of sunflowers scorched by the dry wind, at the pig farms, at the quarries and rivers and at the wild garlic growing green at the edge of the road.

Lev wore a leather jacket and jeans and a leather cap pulled low over his eyes and

his

handsome face was grey-toned from his smoking and in his hands he clutched an

old red

cotton handkerchief and a dented pack of Russian cigarettes. He would soon be

forty three.

After some miles, as the sun came up, Lev took out a cigarette and stuck it between

his

lips, and the woman sitting next to him, a plump, contained person with moles like

splashes of mud on her face, said quickly: 'I'm sorry, but there is no smoking allowed

on this bus.'

Lev knew this, had known it in advance, had tried to prepare himself mentally for the

long agony of it. But even an unlit cigarette was a companion – something to hold on

to, something that had promise in it

• and all he could be bothered to do now was to nod, just to show the woman

that he'd heard what she'd said, reassure her that he wasn't going to cause

trouble; because there they would have to sit for fifty hours or more, side by

side with their separate aches and dreams, like a married couple. They would

hear each other's snores and sighs, smell the food and drink each had

brought with them, note the degree to which each was fearful or unafraid,

make short forays into conversation.

And then later, when they finally arrived in London, they would probably

separate with barely a word or a look, walk out into a rainy morning, each

alone and beginning a new life.

And Lev thought how all of this was odd but necessary and already told him

things about the world he was travelling to, a world in which he would break

his back working

– if only that work could be found. He would hold himself apart from other people,

find corners and shadows in which to sit and smoke, demonstrate that he didn't

need to belong, that his heart remained in his own country.

There were two coach-drivers. These men would take turns to drive and to sleep.

There

was an on-board lavatory, so the only stops the bus would make would be for gas.

At gas stations, the passengers would be able to clamber off, walk a few paces, see

wild

flowers on a verge, soiled paper among bushes, sun or rain on the road. They might

stretch up their arms, put on dark glasses against the onrush of nature's light, look

for a

clover leaf, smoke and stare at the cars rushing by. Then they would be herded back

onto the coach, resume their old attitudes, arm themselves for the next hundred

miles,

for the stink of another industrial zone, or the sudden gleam of a lake, for rain and

sunset and the approach of darkness on silent marshes. There would be times when

the

journey would seem to have no end.

Sleeping upright was not something Lev was practised in. The old seemed to be

able to

do it, but forty-two was not yet old. Lev's father, Stefan, sometimes used to sleep

upright, in summer, on a hard wooden chair in his lunch break at the Baryn sawmill,

with

the hot sun falling onto the slices of sausage wrapped in paper on his knee and onto

his

flask of tea. Both Stefan and Lev could sleep lying down on a mound of hay or on

the

mossy carpet of a forest.

Often, Lev had slept on a rag rug beside his daughter's bed,

when she was ill or afraid. And when his wife, Marina, was dying, he'd lain for five

nights

on an area of linoleum flooring no wider than his outstretched arm, between Marina's

hospital bed and a curtain patterned with pink and purple daisies, and sleep had

come

and gone in a mystifying kind of way, painting strange pictures in Lev's brain that

had

never completely vanished.

Towards evening, after two stops for gas, the mole-flecked woman unwrapped a

hard

-boiled egg. She peeled it silently. The smell of the egg reminded Lev of the sulphur

springs at Jor, where he'd taken Marina, just in case nature could cure what man

had

given up for lost. Marina had immersed her body obediently in the scummy water,

lain

there looking at a female stork returning to its high nest, and said to Lev: 'If only we

were storks.'

'Why d'you say that?' Lev had asked.

'Because you never see a stork dying. It's as though they didn't die.'

If only we were storks.

EPIGRAPH, GRAPES OF WRATH NOTES"How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?  No. Leave it. Burn it. They sat and looked at it and burned it into their memories. How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know -- and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you

can't. The willow tree is you."

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad and his family are forced from their farm in the Depression-era Oklahoma Dust Bowl and set out for California along with thousands of others in search of jobs, land, and hope for a brighter future. Considered John Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath is a story of human unity and love as well as the need for cooperative rather than individualistic ideals during hard times.

Written by: John Steinbeck

Type of Work: novel

Genres: historical fiction

First Published: 1939 Setting: the Great Depression; Oklahoma

The phrase 'grapes of wrath' is a Biblical allusion, or reference, to the Book of Revelation, passage 14:19-20: ''So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God.''

In this passage, the wrath of God is his anger and punishment over the evil that it is in the world; this line is a metaphor, or comparison, using grapes and the wine press where the angel is helping God transform the grapes (evil on earth) into God's wrath, punishment, and justice (wine). Here, wine symbolizes the blood that will come from his wrath. Essentially, the quote is about God bestowing vengeance and justice upon the people who are evil on earth and deserve punishment.

There is a second source that the title is a reference to, and this one is the famous song ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic''. Because the song was written in the context of American history and politics, it connects to The Grapes of Wrath more clearly because it is also a text that is grounded in a specific time and place in American history. Julia Howe wrote ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' in 1861. The opening stanza references the Biblical passage, but this time, it uses the actual phrase ''the grapes of wrath,'' which gives it a more obvious connection to the novel's title:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;

His truth is marching on.

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other.