Snow JULIA ALVAREZ

 Snow

JULIA ALVAREZ

Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic

school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black

gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I

liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister

Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class

how to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in

a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so

that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated

the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow.

Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air.

Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba.

Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York

City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home,

explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school,

we had air-raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the

hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair

falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters

and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb,

radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen.

She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of

chalkmarks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.

The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up

in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as

I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the

ones Sister Zoe had drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked,

“Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as

she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.

But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded. “Why, Yolanda dear, that’s

snow!” She laughed. “Snow.”

“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard

about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my

desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below.

Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable

and beautiful.

[1984]

Read the following story — “Snow” by Julia Alvarez — and then discuss your experience of it, your analysis of it, and how you might extend your analysis beyond the story. Keep in mind that these are not entirely separate steps. Simply go through the three steps by talking with your classmates about the story.

 

Ans 1

The passage “snow” by Julia Alvarez starts off as a simple story about a girl named Yolanda who had just recently moved to New York. Then, the passage shifts in tone when it starts to describe the atmosphere of world war 2 from a child’s perspective. The brief passage does an excellent job at portraying the great loss of innocence in such a small period of time. Towards the start of the story young Yolanda is being taught English. The words she learns are, “laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow,” then as the war approaches she has to learn words like “nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter.” These words are directly juxtaposing the earlier terms as being more violent and corrupt. Alvarez uses describes the political climate at the time when says, “holocaust was in the air.” Literally, holocaust means a mass slaughter and iis used to refer to the religious genocide of German Jews by the Nazis. At the end of the story, the narrator mistakes snow, an innocent concept, for a nuclear bomb due to the fact that instead of being taught “normal” things taught in schools, Yolanda’s first impression of America as a whole was very dark in that she learned what to do when a nuclear bomb is dropped rather than what to expect when seasons change.
This concept can be applied to our lives in 2018, where we have to teach kindergarteners what to do if there is an armed person in the school. As a country we are forced to take valuable time that could be used to teach the children writing or math, to have lockdown drills. This relates to how the innocence of children are ripped away due to the violence in the world. In the passage the catalysts for this loss of innocence just happens to be a world war.

 

 

Ans 2

The poem “Snow” by Julia Alvarez is about a girl named Yolanda that is not from America and is in a catholic school class. One day the students were in class and saw white stuff in the air, but thought that it was bombs in the air since they had drills of what to do if there were bombs. It was at a paranoid time for everyone when Russians were making bombs aimed for New York City, and the President of t.v warning people. “All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below” (Alvarez). This piece of text is very elaborate and shows that Yolanda is still a young innocent child that is unaware of many things. “Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air” (Alvarez). The author uses the word holocaust to illustrate fear that was going around (air) about the concerns of being bombed. The deeper understanding of this poem is that snow is the resemblance of peace because since there was fear of bombs, the snow shows a more calm peaceful idea of safety for Yolanda and the students. “Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful” (Alvarez). This shows that it took everyone's mind off of the drills and the fear of destruction and fallouts and put there thoughts on a more “beautiful” thing/idea. The snowflakes were basically a distraction for the kids innocence of being corrupt and placed in a time of fear. Towards the beginning of the poem the tone was more of a gloomy straightforward but towards the end of the poem the writer is more joyful to see snow, especially since she has heard about it being in American and her first time actually seeing it in person.

 

Approaching Literature “ ‘Out, Out —,’ ” by Robert Frost

 Approaching Literature

6. “ ‘Out, Out —,’ ” by Robert Frost

There are many specific strategies to approaching a literary text and writing about

it. Some of these strategies we’ll discuss in detail in the next three chapters; others,

your teachers will recommend. We want to start, though, by suggesting a straightforward three-step approach that will give you a way into any written text: experience, analysis,

and extension.

Let’s try these steps with the following poem, “ ‘Out, Out —,’ ” by Robert Frost.

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other 5

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said 10

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside them in her apron

To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, 15

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap —

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand 20

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all —

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart —

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off — 25

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then — the watcher at his pulse took fright. 30

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little — less — nothing! — and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

[1916]

Experience

When we experience literature, we respond to it subjectively, personally, emotionally.

This poem presents a fairly grisly scene: A boy is at work cutting wood, the saw slips,

and he cuts his hand. Despite the doctor’s efforts, the boy dies. Then everyone goes back to work — end of story. You might find this a distasteful scene, you might find

it sad, you might think that the people in the poem are heartless and cold, it might

remind you of something you read about or even experienced. Maybe you came away

thinking that most people aren’t really as callous as the ones in this poem. If you live in

the city, you might feel removed from the rural Vermont setting; if you’ve spent time on

a farm, the poem might have a more familiar ring to it. Any or all of these responses are

perfectly legitimate; in fact, at this early stage, there truly are no wrong answers, or any

answers at all. Even at this first step, however, you cannot help but notice the language

and details — such as the pretty sunset next to the sound of the buzz saw or the fact that

the boy appeals to his sister while the parents are absent from the scene.

Analysis

But you’re just getting started. You might think that you haven’t done very productive

work by merely responding, but you have: you’ve entered the world of the poem. The

next step is to move from feeling to thinking — to analyze the work. Here’s where you

begin to ask questions, to think about the way language is used, to draw inferences.

The key is observation: no detail is unimportant, so notice, notice, notice. In the next

chapters, we’ll talk more about what to look for, and give you strategies for paying

close attention to the work. For now, we’ll keep it simple. What do you notice about

the language and structure of this poem? What connections or patterns emerge?

What inferences might you draw from those connections? If you notice something

unusual, something that stands out from the rest of the poem, you probably want

to ask why. At this stage, you’re basically reading between the lines as you consider

what is directly expressed along with what is indirectly expressed through figurative

language (language that’s not literal) and other poetic techniques.

In the first line of “ ‘Out, Out — ’ ” you probably noted that the buzz saw is depicted

as an animal that “snarled and rattled,” a description repeated three times before the

saw “leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap” (l. 16). This personification

suggests that this wasn’t an accident; the saw is a predator that intended to hurt the

boy. Frost then gives us a description of the natural beauty of the landscape, the “five

mountain ranges one behind the other / under the sunset far into Vermont” (ll. 5–6).

Why would Frost turn a saw into a vicious animal and then show us the beautiful

Vermont countryside? Maybe he’s saying that nature has two sides, violent and

peaceful, predatory and nourishing? What do you think?

Notice that the poem is told from the third-person point of view, except in line 10,

when the speaker comments that he wishes they would have “Call[ed] it a day” and

given the boy a half hour away from his work. Why shift perspective here? Perhaps

it was Frost’s way of anticipating the accident to come. Maybe lines 10–12 are put in

there to give the poem a bit of soul, to express some regret, to temper the cold practicality

of the final lines. Perhaps you have another interpretation of this choice.

Titles can be a clue to larger issues in a poem, and the quotation marks that

surround this one signal that it’s taken from another source. The phrase “Out, out”

is from act V, scene v, of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. The exact lines are:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

 

Macbeth himself utters this speech at the end of the play after being informed

of Lady Macbeth’s death, recognizing the brevity of life and the futility of all his

worldly ambitions. You might ask why Frost would connect this rural scene with a

Shakespearean tragedy. Is Frost saying that death is tragic? Is it a reminder that life

is fleeting? Is it a recognition that the forces of nature (those “mountain ranges one

behind the other / Under the sunset”) are uncaring, indifferent to human beings? Is

the speaker denouncing those who “were not the one dead” for their lack of feeling,

acknowledging the necessity to carry on — or perhaps both? Is Frost arguing for a

carpe diem (seize the day) belief system, in which the best we can do is appreciate the

mountains and sunset because anything can happen? The answers to such analytical

questions will lead to your interpretation of the poem.

Extension

At this point, you have analyzed a text and drawn inferences to arrive at an interpretation.

For many assignments, that’s all you will need to do. But sometimes you’ll be

asked to extend your interpretation from the world of the poem to the real world.

This type of extension may involve examination of the background of the author,

research into the historical context of the work, or application of the ideas in the

piece to life in general.

For instance, biographical research on Frost and “ ‘Out, Out — ’ ” reveals that

Frost based the poem on an actual incident in 1915, when his neighbor’s son lost his

hand to a buzz saw. The boy went into shock from blood loss, and the efforts of the

physician called to the scene could not save him. Obviously, Frost did not write the

poem to report this specific incident, but he must have seen something in it that had

meaning beyond the actual event. The poem might be seen as his way of immortalizing

the boy and thus giving his young life meaning. Or perhaps Frost — who was

over forty at the time the poem was written — was recognizing his own mortality and

reflecting on the fleeting nature of all human life.

If you research the time period when this poem was written, you’ll find that

young children often worked long hours in unsafe conditions to help support their

families. Child labor laws adopted in 1924 ended this practice. Using this information,

you might build the case that Frost was making a political statement by illustrating

the dangers of expecting a boy, “a child at heart,” to do “a man’s work.” Also, the

poem offers an entrance into understanding the social conditions of this time period,

when everyone in the family had to contribute in order to survive. When the boy

“saw all spoiled,” he may have been thinking of the hardship of losing a hand, but he may also have been thinking that his loss of productivity would be a real hardship for

a family struggling to make it in the face of harsh economic realities.

The poem also asks how we should grieve. Is the best way to honor the dead

to return to the activities of the living? In an extension paper you might argue that

getting right back to work instead of grieving is an economic reality of the working

class, regardless of time and place. You might also consider the language of the poem

as a way to extend its meaning. Frost’s personification of the predatory saw within the

idyllic natural beauty could be read as the intrusion of the machine into the garden,

the negative or dangerous impact of technology (or, in Frost’s day, mechanization)

on the unspoiled beauty of nature. Can the two coexist? If you pursue this line of

thinking, imagine how you might tie it to earlier works of American literature or to

contemporary warnings of the dangers of technology on the natural world.