The Blanket

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The Blanket

• Floyd Dell

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Warm-up activities
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Please answer the questions

• 1. Can you tell a story according to the picture?
• 2. How do you think of the family environment in
  the picture?
• 3. What is the moral of the picture?

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Background information

• 1. About the author He was born in Barry in 1887
  and lived in Chicago. Like his better-known
  contemporary, Dell wrote about the restlessness
  and disillusionment that characterized America in
  the years between World Wars I and II, as well as
  the lighter side of the Jazz Age. He had strong
  left-wing political beliefs and many of his works
  reflect that views, and were reprinted by radical
  publishing houses in the 1970s.

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Background information

• 2. His main works
• 1) Moon-Calf, 1920
• 2) Janet March, 1923
• 3) Runaway, 1925
• 4) An Old Man's Folly A Novel, 1926
• 5) An Unmarried Father, 1927
• 6) Homecoming --- An Autobiography
• 7) The Golden Spike, 1934

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Text analysis

• 1. Understand the structure of the text by
  answering the following questions
• Part one (p. 1) The whole situation of the
  story.
• what would happen to the family?
• Part two (p. 2-9) Grandson and granddads
  feelings towards whats happening.
• 1) How the author builds up the sorrowful
  atmosphere indirectly in the second part?

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Text analysis

• 2) Whats the attitude of the granddad to being
  asked to leave the family?
• Part three (p.10-26) What happened when dad
  returned with the girl.
• 1) whats the girls attitudes to the
  grandfathers leaving?
• 2) what kind of person the girl is?
• 3) why the boy wants to cut the blanket into two?
• 4) why they all crying together?

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Text analysis

• 2. Whats the meaning and function of the
  blanket?
• Its meaning
• The blanket has different meanings to three
  charactersgranddad, son, and the girl. For the
  granddad, it is the last thing that his son left
  him in this family and it also indicates that
  hell leave the family forever. For the son, it
  means departure from his granddad and its the
  embodiment of his fathers coldness to his
  granddad. And for the young girl, it means too
  much money its too expensive for an old man.

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Text analysis

• Its function
• In the first part, the blanket refers to the real
  thing that Dad brought for Granddad. In the
  second part, it is used as a clue to disclose the
  granddad and sons feelings. But in the third
  part, it serves as a mirror reflecting the girls
  selfish inner mind.

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Text analysis

• 3. Character analysis
• 1) Granddad
• easy-going old man trying his best to make
  easier being consistent with his way of life to
  deal with the hard problems in life
  self-sacrificing to maintain the happiness of the
  whole family
• 2) The boy
• naïve, but full of righteousness, respecting old
  man clever

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Text analysis

• 3) Dad
• reluctant to send his father away, he wants and
  tries to be good but has no good choice. Living
  under the pressure from his future young wife, he
  has to do so. But finally, with his sons words,
  his conscience came back.
• 4) Girl
• pretty, but cold-blooded, greedy, mean.

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Key points in the text

• 1. useful words and phrases
• 1) embarrassment (p.12) embarrass,
  embarrassed, embarrassing, e.g.
• He could not hide his embarrassment at his
  children's rudeness.
• He didn't want to embarrass her by asking
  questions.
• I felt embarrassed about how untidy the house
  was.
• She asked a lot of embarrassing questions

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1. useful words and phrases

• Fill in the blanks with the different forms of
  embarrass
• 1) To her -----, she couldn't remember his name.
• 2) The revelations in the press have ----- the
  government.
• 3) Lori gets----- if we ask her to sing.
• 4) This incident is deeply ----- for the
  government.

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1.useful words and phrases

• 2) be off doing
• 3) send away
• 4) tune up
• 5) take sb. off
• 6) cast down

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2. Useful grammatical structures

• 1) with somebody/something doing something, e.g.
• It was a fine September night, with a thin white
  moon riding over the roof.(para.2)
• and hed never want to sit here on the porch
  again with Granddad gone. (para.7)
• More examples
• We jumped into the water with bullets whizzing
  past our ears.
• I can't do my homework with all this noise going
  on.

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2. Useful grammatical structures

• Similar structures
• with sb.or sth done
• with sb.or sth adj/adv/prep. Phrase
• 2) It is /was that /who .
• it was he that wanted to go to that ugly
  government place, (para.4)
• 3) must have done sth.
• It must have cost something, that. (para.13)

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Further discussion of the text

• What is the moral of this picture?
• Make a comparison between the picture and the
  text, and then what can you learn from them?
• What is the appropriate/ideal relationship among
  family members?

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Assignment

• Please write a summary of the article with not
  less than 150 words.

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Thats the end!

• Thank you!