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Reading & Responding - Unit 2 VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 1 HOLIDAYHOMEWORK II–ExtendedResponse
Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 1
HOLIDAY HOMEWORK
II – Extended Response
Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 2
Bellow you will find important excerpts from the novel. Read these passages again and show your
understanding.
Useful ways to respond:
• In this part of the novel…(explain what is happening)
• The theme or ethical question here seems to be…(consider the novel's underlying messages)
• This excerpt tells us…(what do we learn about the characters in this scene?)
SAMPLE EXCERPT “My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.” (p. 289)
This quotation occurs during Amir’s meeting with Assef as he tries to find Sohrab in Chapter 22. Assef
beats Amir with brass knuckles, snapping Amir’s ribs, splitting his lip and busting his jaw, and breaking the
bone beneath his left eye, but because Amir feels he deserves this, he feels relief. He thinks he should have
accepted the beating from Assef years ago, when he was given the choice of saving Hassan—and likely
getting physically hurt—or letting Assef rape Hassan. Since that time, Amir has struggled with his guilt,
which was only made worse by the fact that he was never punished for his actions. He had even gone
looking for punishment in the past, as when he tried to get Hassan to hit him with the pomegranates,
because he felt then there would at least be some justice for the way he treated Hassan. But Amir’s guilt
lingered until his confrontation with Assef, which despite the physical pain, made him feel psychologically
healed. Thus, while Assef beat him, he began to laugh.
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 3
EXCERPT #1 "I loved him because he was my friend, but also because he was a good man, maybe even a great man. And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good." -Rahim Khan's letter to Amir (P.302)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 4
EXCERPT #2 As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, "I wish you'd give the chemo a chance, Baba." Baba pocketed the keys, pulled me out of the rain and under the building's striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with the hand holding the cigarette. "Bas! I've made my decision." "What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?" I said, my eyes welling up. A look of disgust swept across his rain-soaked face. It was the same look he'd given me when, as a kid, I'd fall, scrape me knees, and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that brought it on now. "You're twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown man! You " he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the canvas awning. "What's going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that's what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question." (156- 157)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 5
EXCERPT #3 I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realise I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years. (P.1)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 6
EXCERPT #4 That was when Baba stood up. It was my turn to clamp a hand on his thigh, but Baba pried it loose, snatched his leg away. When he stood, he eclipsed the moonlight. "I want you to ask this man something," Baba said. He said it to Karim, but looked directly at the Russian officer. "Ask him where his shame is." They spoke. "He says this is war. There is no shame in war." "Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." (P.115)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 7
EXCERPT #5 "There is a way to be good again." - Rahim Khan (P. 2) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 8
EXCERPT #6 “I have a wife in America, a home, a career, and a family. Kabul is a dangerous place, you know that, and you'd have me risk everything for " I stopped. "You know," Rahim Khan said, "one time, when you weren't around, your father and I were talking. And you know how he always worried about you in those days. I remember he said to me, 'Rahim, a boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.' I wonder, is that what you've become?" (P.221)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 9
EXCERPT #7 "Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours." - Rahim Khan (P.21) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 10
EXCERPT #8 "Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?" "No, Baba jan," I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn't want to disappoint him again. "When you kill a man, you steal a life," Baba said. "You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?" (P. 18) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 11
EXCERPT #9 "It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir." - Baba (P. 142)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 12
EXCERPT #10 One day, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in Fremont. I was standing in the Westerns section when a guy next to me, sipping Coke from a 7-Eleven cup, pointed to The Magnificent Seven and asked me if I had seen it. "Yes, thirteen times," I said. "Charles Branson dies in it, so do James Coburn and Robert Vaughn." He gave me a pinch-faced look, as if I had just spat in his soda. "Thanks a lot, man," he said, shaking his head and muttering something as he walked away. That was when I learned that, in America, you don't reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologise profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End. In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba's friends—second and third cousins milling in and out of the house—wanted to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyab and fulfill his dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure? Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know. If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn't know what to say. Does anybody's? After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis. (P. 356 - 357)
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Reading & Responding - Unit 2
VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2 13
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