locate six sources of literary scholarship.
Use the story below and talk about the literary elements in it.
Make sure to connect it to the essay provided.
Story: They were up on a picnic table at that park by the lake, by the edge at the lake, with part of a downed tree in the shallows half hidden by the bank. Lane A. Dean, Jr., and his girlfriend, both in bluejeans and button-up shirts. They sat up on the table’s top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on to picnic or fellowship together in carefree times. They’d gone to different high
schools but the same junior college, where they had met in campus ministries. It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much. There were bees, and the angle of the sun made the water of the shallows look dark. There had been more storms that week, with some downed trees and the sound of chainsaws all up and down his parents’ street. Their postures on the picnic table were both the same
forward kind with their shoulders rounded and elbows on their knees. In this positon the girl rocked slightly and once put her face in her hands, but she was not ane was very still and immobile and looking past the bank at the downed the shallows and its ball of exposed roots going all directions and the tree’s
cloud of branches all half in the water. The onlv other individual nearby was dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright. Looking at the torn-up
hole in the ground there where the tree had gone over. It was still early yet and all
the shadows wheeling right and shortening. The girl wore a thin old checked cot-
ton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeves down and always smelled
very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if vou
weren’t in love. Lane Dean had liked the smell of her right away. His mother called
her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell-she
made this evident in little ways. The shallows lapped from different directions at
the tree as if almost teething on it. Sometimes when alone and thinking or strug-
gling to turn a matter over to Jesus Christ in prayer, he would find himself putting
his fist in his palm and turning it slightly as if still playing and pounding his glove
to stay sharp and alert in center. He did not do this now; it would be cruel and
indecent to do this now. The older individual stood beside his picnic table-_he was
at it but not sitting–and looked also out of place in a suit coat or jacket and the
kind of men’s hat Lane’s grandfather wore in photos as a young insurance man. He
appeared to be looking across the lake. If he moved, Lane didn’t see it. He looked
more like a picture than a man. There were not any ducks in view.
One thing Lane Dean did was reassure her again that he’d go with her and be
there with her. It was one of the few safe or decent things he could really say. The
second time he said it again now she shook her head and laughed in an unhappy
way that was more just air out her nose. Her real laugh was different. Where he’d be
was the waiting room, she said. That he’d be thinking about her and feeling bad for
her, she knew, but he couldn’t be in there with her. This was so obviously true that
he felt like a ninny that he’d kept on about it and now knew what she had thought
every time he went and said it- it hadn’t brought her comfort or eased the burden
at all. The worse he felt, the stiller he sat. The whole thing felt balanced on a knife
or wire; if he moved to put his arm up or touch her the whole thing could tip over.
He hated himself for sitting so frozen. He could almost visualize himself tiptoeing
past something explosive. A big stupid-looking tiptoe, like in a cartoon. The whole
last black week had been this way and it was wrong. He knew it was wrong, knew
something was required of him that was not this terrible frozen care and caution.
but he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. He
pretended it had no name. He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be
right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings. He also
worked dock and routing at UPS, on top of school, but had traded to get the day off
after they’d decided together. Two days before, he had awakened very early and
tried to pray but could not. He was freezing more and more solid, he felt like, but he
had not thought of his father or the blank frozenness of his father, even in church,
which had once filled him with such pity. This was the truth. Lane Dean, Jr., felt
sun on one arm as he pictured in his mind an image of himself on a train, waving
mechanically to something that got smaller and smaller as the train pulled away.
His father and his mother’s father had the same birthday, a Cancer. Sheris hair was
colored an almost corn blond, very clean, the skin through her central part pink in
the sunlight. They’d sat here long enough that only their right side was shaded now.
He could look at her head, but not at her. Different parts of him felt unconnected to
each other. She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school-
Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right; he was hanging in
there. She was a year older, twenty, but it was also more–she had always seemed to
be on good terms with her life in a way that age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew what it is she wanted, which was nursing and not an
easy program at Peoria Junior College, and plus she worked hostessing at the
Embers and had bought her own car. She was serious in a way Lane liked. She had
a cousin that died when she was thirteen, fourteen, that she’d loved and been close
with. She only talked about it that once. He liked her smell and her downy arms and
the way she exclaimed when something made her laugh. He had liked just being
with her and talking to her. She was serious in her faith and values in a way that
Lane had liked and now, sitting here with her on the table, found himself afraid of.
This was an awful thing. He was starting to believe that he might not be serious in
his faith. He might be somewhat of a hypocrite, like the Assyrians in Isaiah,’ which
would be a far graver sin than the appointment–he had decided he believed this.
He was desperate to be good people, to still be able to feel he was good. He rarely
before now had thought of damnation and Hell-that part of it didn’t speak to his
spirit-and in worship services he more just tuned himself out and tolerated Hell
when it came up, the same way you tolerate the job you’ve got to have to save up for
what it is you want. Her tennis shoes had little things doodled on them from sitting
in her class lectures. She stayed looking down like that. Little notes or reading
assignments in Bic in her neat round hand on the rubber elements around the
sealer’s rim. Lane A. Dean, looking now at her inclined head’s side’s barrettes in
the shape of blue ladybugs. The appointment was for afternoon, but when the door-
bell had rung so early and his mother’d called to him up the stairs, he had known,
and a terrible kind of blankness had commenced falling through him.
He told her that he did not know what to do. That he knew if he was the sales-
man of it and forced it upon her that was awful and wrong. But he was trying to
understand-they’d prayed on it and talked it through from every different angle.
Lane said how sorry she knew he was, and that if he was wrong in believing they’d
truly decided together when they decided to make the appointment she should
please tell him, because he thought he knew how she must have felt as it got closer
and closer and how she must be so scared, but that what he couldn’t tell was if it
was more than that. He was totally still except for moving his mouth, it felt like. She
did not reply. That if they needed to pray on it more and talk it through, then he was
here, he was ready, he said. ‘The appointment could get moved back; if she just said
the word they could call and push it back to take more time to be sure in the deci-
sion. It was still so early in it–they both knew that, he said. This was true, that he
felt this way, and yet he also knew he was also trying to say things that would get her
to open up and say enough back that he could see her and read her heart and know
what to say to get her to go through with it. He knew this without admitting to him-
self that this was what he wanted, for it would make him a hypocrite and liar. He
knew, in some locked-up little part of him, why it was that he’d gone to no one to
open up and seek their life counsel, not Pastor Steve or the prayer partners at cam-
pus ministries, not his UPS friends or the spiritual counselling available through his
parents’ old church. But he did not know why Sheri herself had not gone to Pastor
Steve~-he could not read her heart. She was blank and hidden. He so fervently
wished it never happened. He felt like he knew now why it was a true sin and not
just a leftover rule from past society. He felt like he had been brought low by it and humbled and now did believe that the rules were there for a reason. That the rules
were concerned with him personally, as an individual. He promised God he had
learned his lesson. But what if that, too, was a hollow promise, from a hypocrite
who repented only after, who promised submission but really only wanted a reprieve?
He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself. He
kept thinking also of 1 Timothy and the hypocrite therein who disputeth over words,?
He felt a terrible inner resistance but could not feel what it was that it resisted. This
was the truth. All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision
together did not ever include it- the word- for had he once said it, avowed that he
did love her, loved Sheri Fisher, then it all would have been transformed. It would
not be a different stance or angle, but a difference in the very thing they were pray-
ins wind we that endow here am itine stoned had prawn tide en there over the pat ame
continued to sit as if thinking, in the pose of thinking, like that one statue. They
were right up next to each other on the table. He was looking over past her at the
tree in the water. But he could not sav he did: it was not true.
But neither did he ever open up and tell her straight out he did not love her. This
might be his lie by omission. This might be the frozen resistance-_were he to look
right at her and tell her he didn’t, she would keep the appointment and go. He
knew this. Something in him, though, some terrible weakness or lack of values,
could not tell her. It felt like a muscle he did not have. He didn’t know why; he just
could not do it, or even pray to do it. She believed he was good, serious in his val-
wes. Part of him seemed willing to more or less just about lie to someone with that
kind of faith and trust, and what did that make him? How could such a type of
individual even pray? What it really felt like was a taste of the reality of what might
be meant by Hell. Lane Dean had never believed in Hell as a lake of fire or a loving
God consigning folks to a burning lake of fire–he knew in his heart this was not
true. What he believed in was a living God of compassion and love and the possi-
bility of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through whom this love was
enacted in human time. But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as
outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he
could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two
great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent.
There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle–the armies would stay like
that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so dif-
ferent and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear
each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked
like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-
hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.
When he moved his head, a part of the lake further out flashed with sun–the
water up close wasn’t black now, and you could see into the shallows and see that all
the water was moving but gently, this way and that–and in this same way he
besought to return to himself as Sheri moved her leg and started to turn beside him.
He could see the man in the suit and gray hat standing motionless now at the lake’s rim, holding something under one arm and looking across at the opposite side where
a row of little forms on camp chairs sat in a way that meant they had lines in the
water for crappie-which mostly only your blacks from the East Side ever did–and
the little white shape at the row’s end a Styrofoam creel. In his moment or time at
the lake now just to come, Lane Dean first felt he could take this all in whole: everv-
thing seemed distinctly lit, for the circle of the pin oak’s shade had rotated off all the
way, and they sat now in sun with their shadow a two-headed thing in the grass
before them. He was looking or gazing again at where the downed tree’s branches
seemed to all bend so sharply just under the shallows’ surface when he was given to
know that through all this frozen silence he’d despised he had, in truth, been pray-
ing, or some little part of his heart he could not hear had, for he was answered now
with a type of vision, what he would later call within his own mind a vision or
moment of grace. He was not a hypocrite, just broken and split off like all men. Later
on, he believed that what happened was he’d had a moment of almost seeing them
both as Jesus saw them-as blind but groping, wanting to please God despite their
inborn fallen nature. For in that same given moment he saw, quick as light, into
Sheri’s heart, and was made to know what would occur here as she finished turning
to him and the man in the hat watched the fishing and the downed elm shed cells
into the water. This down-to-earth girl that smelled good and wanted to be a nurse
would take and hold one of his hands in both of hers to unfreeze him and make him
look at her, and she would say that she cannot do it. That she is sorry she did not
know this sooner, that she hadn’t meant to lie- she agreed because she’d wanted to
believe that she could, but she cannot. That she will carry this and have it; she has
to. With her gaze clear and steady. That all night last night she prayed and searched
inside herself and decided this is what love commands of her. That Lane should
please please sweetie let her finish. That listen- this is her own decision and obliges
him to nothing. That she knows he does not love her, not that way, has known it all
this time, and that it’s all right. That it is as it is and it’s all right. She will carry this,
and have it, and love it and make no claim on Lane except his good wishes and
respecting what she has to do. That she releases him, all claim, and hopes he fin-
ishes up at P.J.C, and does so good in his life and has all joy and good things. Her
voice will be clear and steady, and she will be lying, for Lane has been given to read
her heart. To see through her. One of the opposite side’s blacks raises his arm in
what may be greeting, or waving off a bee. There is a mower cutting grass some-
place off behind them. It will be a terrible, last-ditch gamble born out of the des
peration in Sheri Fisher’s soul, the knowledge that she can neither do this thing
today nor carry a child alone and shame her family. Her values blocked the way
either way, Lane could see, and she has no other options or choice-this lie is not a
sin. Galatians 4:16, Have I then become your enemy?? She is gambling that he is
good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean, Jr., sees all
this, and is moved with pity, and also with something more, something without any
name he knows, that is given to him in the form of a question that never once in all
the long week’s thinking and division had even so much as occurred- why is he so
sure he doesn’t love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is? What would even Jesus do? For it was just now he felt her
two small strong soft hands on his, to turn him. What if he was just afraid, if the
truth was no more than this, and if what to pray for was not even love but simple
courage, to meet both her eyes as she says it and trust his heart?