Easter Rising
By Michael Patrick MacDonald
comments -
1. After Kevin died, I wasn't afraid of death anymore. Eight months after Frankie's death, we were told that Kevin had hung himself in jail. Though Ma didn't believe that, because she said a cop on Whitey's payroll had visited him the night before he was found dead outside his cell.
2. All my life I had struggled with the answers to the question,"How many are in your family?" and it wasn't getting any easier. My mother had lost the baby, Patrick a year before I was born, but we always included him in the count. Since we thought of him as a kind of guardian sibling.
3.On the sluggish trolley race home, all I could think about was that I'd never before seen just how ugly the world was.
4. I was looking at my father for the first time. Ma said he'd come to see me when I was a baby, but I was nineteen now and he hadn't come to see me since. I knew I was looking at him for the last time too. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see the resemblance to myself.
5. "Jesus Christ, what the hell did you go over there for with no money?" Ma wasn't yelling at me, she was just screaming to me since I was all the way across the Atlantic. Ma always yelled through phone lines, but whenever I called her long distance I had to pull the phone away from my ear.
questions -
1. What made Michael's family think Kevin's death was not a suicide?
2. Why didn't Michael try harder to prove that George Fox was his real father after George's sister denied him at the wake?
3. What made Michael leave so suddenly for the trip to Europe?
4. Why didn't Michael tell his family before he took off for England?
vocabulary -
1. condolences -page 129 Sympathy with a person who has experienced pain, grief, or misfortune.
2. trudging - page 168 a laborious or tiring walk.
3. labyrinth -page 170 an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit.
literary terms -
1. settings - Home, the funeral parlor and church in Dorchester and Europe, mostly England.
2. exposition - Kevin's death, then his natural father's death causes Michael to rethink his goals once again.
outline -
Kevin dies under suspicious circumstances, then Michael's "real' father George dies and Michael has to come face to face with a stranger that oddly looks exactly like him. All the strress makes Michael want to get as far away from home and family as possible. Michael packs his bags and with little money heads off to Europe. While in England he looks up family and also is able to see punk bands he only dreamed of seeing.