Paper #1: That Which Cannot Be Named!

“People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter, you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it” (King 98).

“Horror stories,” or “ghost stories” (or whatever you want to call them) force us not only to face our fears, but to safely discuss our taboos between the covers of a book. Yet we keep telling the same kinds of stories, which suggests our fears (and secrets) remain the same, or that we’re not listening to the conversation of horror going back two hundred years or more. Maybe we should start listening?

For your first paper, I want you to explore a significant taboo, or secret, you see being discussed in several of the stories. It could be something big (murder, the unknown) or something more complex and harder to put into words (see below). Explain why you feel this subject is taboo in our society, and how each story uses elements of terror to discuss it. Be sure to use specific examples from the stories—QUOTE them, at least once per story—and help your reader understand these passages. When using a quote in your paper, it should follow the format below:

In King’s novel, Carrie, the main character fears that the rest of her life will be “a creeping, subterranean existence in this house supported by Momma…getting fatter, losing hope, losing even the power to think” (147). This quote is important because…

[Introduce the quote, cite the page number at the end, and then explain how you read the quote—or why you feel it’s significant to your discussion.]

REMEMBER that the taboos don’t have to be easy, one-word issues. For example, in Carrie, one taboo seems to be the prevalence of human sacrifice in the modern world. Even though we don’t literally kill people, we symbolically kill them every day—especially in high school. Carrie’s ritual slaughter (symbolized by pig’s blood?) becomes literal when she turns the tables on them. Or maybe it’s simply the taboo of cruelty? Or the law of the jungle? Help us see what it is and how it operates in the stories, even if you see it working in different ways in different stories.

REQUIREMENTS

• At least 3-4 pages double spaced
• Must use at least 3 stories in your discussion; you can use one story more than another, but reference at least 3
• Quote and cite stories according to MLA format and provide a Works Cited page
• Due Friday, February 22 by 5pm [no class that day