Week 3 Writing Assignment
Brittany Lynch
Keiser University

WEEK 3 WRITING ASSIGNMENT PART 1
The Author I chose is Randall Jarrell. His passage is very interesting. The most significant thing about the protagonist is the fact that he's dead. He tells us the tale of his own death. It is also important to think about how he tells us the story. He doesn't seem too worked up about it—quite the opposite, really. He tells us part of the story in a fairly dry, matter-of-fact way, and he tells us other parts in a kind of mysterious, figurative way.

So, what are the advantages of having a dead speaker? It gives the poem a very different tone than it might have if the speaker were recounting the death of a friend or fellow soldier. It is unusual for us to be able to discuss something as dramatic and emotional as a violent death in such a detached or metaphorical way as our speaker does.

By writing this poem in the voice of a dead soldier, Jarrell is able to make every aspect of the poem contain the element of death, even the parts that are about living.

The living are always going to have a very different perspective on death than the dead which makes this passage so interesting because it give the perspective on death from the actual dead, which is seldom because …well, they’re DEAD!

WEEK 3 WRITING ASSIGNMENT PART 2
I chose F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Babylon Revisited" is the story of a Charlie Wales, a former drunken party-goer who returns to Paris, the site of his former 1920s debauchery, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. Charlie sees his world with new (sober) eyes and is both shocked and appalled by the extravagance that characterized his former life. The story is rooted in the financial crisis of its times. Fitzgerald wrote the piece in December of 1930, when the good times of the Jazz Age (also called the "Roaring Twenties") had come to an end