Timmy's Essay 5

Timmy O’Brien
Mr. Salsich
English 9
6 November 2008

A Second Look:

An Essay on the Advantages and New Insights of Re-reading

        1. Every once in a while during your reading you may be confused by a certain sentence or paragraph, so you go back to read it again. 2. What some people don’t realize is that this can be helpful on a much larger scale. 3. If you reread a whole story or novel, you may come to understand everything about that work much better. 4. I put this into use with the short story “The Garden Party” in the hopes that I will better be able to understand the particular events of the story.
        TS Upon taking a second look at “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield, I saw several things I had not noticed at first. SD First, the peculiar relationship of Laura and her mother stood out to me. CM When Laura suggests that to have a party in the area of a dead man would “terribly heartless of [them]” (brief quote), Mrs. Sheridan gets angry. CM Instead of talking with her daughter about this conflict, she deliberately tries to change her mind by giving her a hat and shifting her mindset from their heartlessness to her own prettiness. SD Another thing that stood out to me was the new theme of focusing on oneself instead of others. CM This was made apparent to me because Laura admired her own arranging capabilities, was asked not to care about a dying man so they could have a garden party, and said that because the little cottages were “eyesores, [] they had no right to be in that neighborhood at all.” (three action sentence and brief quote) CM Her mother directly tells Laura that the garden party they are hosting should be more important than a dead man in their neighborhood, which seems quite self-serving. SD The last thing I noticed while re-reading this story was the use of the word “relish” in the sentence: “ ‘Dead when the picked him up,’ said Godber’s man with relish”. CM He seems to be happy about informing the Sheridans of the death just down the street, which doesn’t seem right. CM The man could have produced a sympathetic tone to fit the story, but instead he talked with a seemingly arrogant manner, as if the content didn’t actually matte – the only thing that did was that he had a story to tell. CS Re-reading the story, I found many things that helped me understand it’s story, events, and themes.
        1. The things one can achieve through re-reading are endless. 2. You could find a whole new side of a character you never saw before, or discover a different view on a particular event. 3. Either way, whatever you find will most likely enrich your understand of the work you are reading, so next time you finish a book with even the slightest trace of misunderstanding, go back and re-read what you finished. 4. It may come back to help you in later days.