Treasure hunt | highschool

INICIAL CLUE:

You are going to hunt a treasure. But to find it, you will have to learn about some stories and authors you don’t know yet. Let’s start?

Your first clue is hidden in:

When you look fixedly at someone, you _________ at him/her. But this is not the word you need. The word you need is its homophone, and it’s not singular.

1 (hidden on the stairs)

Kudos! You have found your first clue. Here it is:

Blanche DuBois, a schoolteacher from Laurel, Mississippi, arrives at the New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella Kowalski. Blanche tells Stella that she lost Belle Reve, their ancestral home, following the death of all their remaining relatives. She also mentions that she has been given a leave of absence from her teaching position because of her bad nerves.

Though Blanche does not seem to have enough money to afford a hotel, she is disdainful of the apartment’s location in a noisy working-class neighborhood. Blanche dislikes Stella’s husband, an auto-parts supply man of Polish descent named Stanley Kowalski. Stella was happy to leave behind her the social pretensions of her background in exchange for the sexual gratification she gets from her husband; she even is pregnant with his baby. Stanley immediately distrusts Blanche to the extent that he suspects her of having cheated Stella out of her share of the family inheritance. In the process of defending herself to Stanley, Blanche reveals that Belle Reve was lost due to a mortgage, which reveals Blanche’s financial circumstances. Blanche’s heavy drinking, which she attempts to conceal from her sister and brother-in-law, is another sign that all is not well with Blanche.

The unhappiness of Stella and Stanley’s marriage reveals itself when Stanley hosts a drunken poker game with his male friends at the apartment. Blanche starts to win the affections of his close friend Mitch. After Mitch has been absent for a while, speaking with Blanche in the bedroom, Stanley erupts, storms into the bedroom, and throws the radio out of the window. When Stella yells at Stanley and defends Blanche, Stanley beats her. The men pull him off, the poker game breaks up, and Blanche and Stella escape to their upstairs neighbor Eunice’s apartment. A short while later, Stanley is remorseful and cries up to Stella to forgive him. To Blanche’s alarm, Stella returns to Stanley and embraces him passionately. Mitch meets Blanche outside of the Kowalski flat and comforts her in her distress.

The next day, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley for a better man whose social status equals Stella’s. Blanche suggests that she and Stella contact a millionaire named Shep Huntleigh for help escaping from New Orleans; when Stella laughs at her, Blanche reveals that she is completely broke. Stanley walks in as Blanche is making fun of him and secretly overhears Blanche and Stella’s conversation. Later, he threatens Blanche with hints that he has heard rumors of her disreputable past.

While Blanche is alone in the apartment one evening, waiting for Mitch to pick her up for a date, a teenage boy comes by to collect money for the newspaper. Blanche doesn’t have any money for him, but she gives him a lustful kiss. Soon after the boy departs, Mitch arrives, and they go on their date. When Blanche returns, she tels Mitch the greatest tragedy of her past. Years ago, her young husband committed suicide after she discovered his homosexuality. Mitch describes his own loss of a former love, and he tells Blanche that they need each other.

When the next scene begins, about one month has passed. It is the afternoon of Blanche’s birthday. Stella is preparing a dinner for Blanche, Mitch, Stanley, and herself, when Stanley tells her that he discovered Blanche’s sordid past. He says that after losing her house, she moved into a motel from which she was expeled later because of her numerous sexual encounters. She had been fired from her job as a schoolteacher because the principal discovered that she was having an affair with a teenage student. Stella is horrified to learn that Stanley has told Mitch these stories about Blanche.

The birthday dinner comes and goes, but Mitch never arrives. Stanley indicates to Blanche that he is aware of her past. For a birthday present, he gives her a one-way bus ticket back to Laurel. Several hours later, Blanche, drunk, sits alone in the apartment. Mitch, also drunk, arrives and repeats all he’s learned from Stanley. Eventually Blanche confesses that the stories are true, but she also reveals the need for human affection she felt after her husband’s death. Mitch tells Blanche that he can never marry her, saying she isn’t fit to live in the same house as his mother. Having learned that Blanche is not the chaste lady she pretended to be, Mitch tries to have sex with Blanche, but she forces him to leave by yelling “Fire!” to attract the attention of passersby outside.

Later, Blanche, drunk, tells Stanley she will soon be leaving New Orleans with Shep Huntleigh, a millionaire. Stanley knows that Blanche’s story is entirely in her imagination. When she tries to step past him, he refuses to move out of her way. Blanche becomes terrified to the point that she smashes a bottle on the table and threatens to smash Stanley in the face. Stanley grabs her arm and says that it’s time for the “date” they’ve had set up since Blanche’s arrival. Blanche resists, but Stanley uses his physical strength to overcome her, and he carries her to bed. The pulsing music indicates that Stanley rapes Blanche.

The next scene takes place weeks later, as Stella and her neighbor Eunice pack Blanche’s bags. Blanche is in the bath, and Stanley plays poker with his buddies in the front room. A doctor will arrive soon to take Blanche to an insane asylum, but Blanche believes she is leaving to join her millionaire. Stella confesses to Eunice that she simply cannot allow herself to believe Blanche’s assertion that Stanley raped her. When Blanche emerges from the bathroom, her deluded talk makes it clear that she has lost her grip on reality.

The doctor arrives with a nurse, and Blanche initially panics and struggles against them when they try to take her away. Stanley and his friends fight to subdue Blanche, while Eunice holds Stella back to keep her from interfering. Mitch begins to cry. Finally, the doctor approaches Blanche in a gentle manner and convinces her to leave with him. She allows him to lead her away and does not look back or say goodbye as she goes. Stella sobs with her child in her arms, and Stanley comforts her with loving words and caresses.

According to this summary and your own research, which one of the following is FALSE?

Stanley, Stella’s husband, rapes Blanche.
Stella is Blanche’s sister.
Blanche is broke.
Blanche is drunk and crazy.
Blanche’s former husband was a homossexual.
Blanche has had many sexual encounters after she lost her family’s house on mortgage, before she moves to Stella’s apartment.
Mitch refuses to continue with Blanche after Stanley tells him about Blanche’s past.
Stella doesn’t believe Blanche when she says Stanley has raped her.
Blanche is not crazy, she was telling the truth, but nobody believed her.
Blanche, in the end, is taken to an asylum.
The text is the summary of a very famous play.
The author of the play was Tennessee Williams.
The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1947 and was adapted to a cinema version in 1951.
The cry “STELLA!”, by Stanley, is a very famous quotation from the play.

Your next clue is hidden under:

Letter of the answer + last letter of the first word + last letter of the second word + last letter of the third word.

2 (hidden under the desk)

Kudos! You have found your second clue. Here it is:

William Faulkner's 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury is a complex text. Its narrative structure is highly complicated; its frequent use of stream of consciousness creates great narrative density; it is highly allusive and intertextual throughout; and its chronologically restless first section is difficult to understand for most readers.

In 1929, William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, his example par excellence of modernist American fiction.

Attempting to apply traditional plot summary to The Sound and the Fury is difficult. At a basic level, the novel is about the three Compson brothers’ obsessions with the their sister Caddy, but this brief synopsis represents merely the surface of what the novel contains. A story told in four chapters, by four different voices, and out of chronological order, The Sound and the Fury requires intense concentration and patience to interpret and understand.

The first three chapters of the novel consist of the thoughts, voices, and memories of the three Compson brothers, on three different days. The brothers are Benjy, a severely retarded thirty-three-year-old man, speaking in April, 1928; Quentin, a young Harvard student, speaking in June, 1910; and Jason, a bitter farm-supply store worker, speaking again in April, 1928. Faulkner tells the fourth chapter in his own narrative voice, but focuses on Dilsey, the Compson family’s devoted “Negro” cook who has played a great part in raising the children. Faulkner captures the brothers’ memories of their sister Caddy, to predict the decline of the Compson family and to examine the deterioration of the Southern aristocratic class since the Civil War.

The Compsons are one of several prominent names in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Their ancestors helped settle the area and subsequently defended it during the Civil War. Since the war, the Compsons have gradually seen their wealth, land, and status crumble away. Mr. Compson is an alcoholic. Mrs. Compson is a self-absorbed hypochondriac who depends almost entirely upon Dilsey to raise her four children. Quentin, the oldest child, is a sensitive bundle of neuroses. Caddy is stubborn, but loving and compassionate. Jason has been difficult and mean-spirited since birth. Benjy is severely mentally disabled, an “idiot” with no understanding of the concepts of time or morality. In the absence of the self-absorbed Mrs. Compson, Caddy serves as a mother figure and symbol of affection for Benjy and Quentin.

As the children grow older, however, Caddy begins to behave promiscuously, which torments Quentin and sends Benjy into crying. Quentin is preparing to go to Harvard, and Mr. Compson sells a large portion of the family land to provide funds for the tuition. Caddy loses her virginity and becomes pregnant. She is unable or unwilling to name the father of the child, though it is likely Dalton Ames, a boy from town.

Caddy’s pregnancy leaves Quentin emotionally shattered. He attempts to tell his father that he is the father of his sister’s baby, which is not true. Mr. Compson is indifferent to Caddy’s promiscuity, dismissing Quentin’s story and telling his son to leave early for the Northeast.

Attempting to cover up her indiscretions, Caddy quickly marries Herbert Head, a banker she met in Indiana. Herbert promises Jason Compson a job in his bank. Herbert immediately divorces Caddy and rescinds Jason’s job offer when he realizes his wife is pregnant with another man’s child. Meanwhile, Quentin, still mired in despair over Caddy’s sin, commits suicide by drowning himself in the Charles River just before the end of his first year at Harvard.

The Compsons disown Caddy from the family, but take in her newborn daughter, Miss Quentin. The task of raising Miss Quentin falls squarely on Dilsey’s shoulders. Mr. Compson dies of alcoholism roughly a year after Quentin’s suicide. As the oldest surviving son, Jason becomes the head of the Compson household. Bitterly employed in the local farm-supply store, Jason creates a scheme to steal the money Caddy sends to support Miss Quentin.

Miss Quentin grows up to be an unhappy, rebellious, and promiscuous girl, constantly in conflict with her vicious uncle Jason. On Easter Sunday, 1928, Miss Quentin steals several thousand dollars from Jason and runs away with a man from a traveling show. While Jason chases after Miss Quentin, Dilsey takes Benjy and the rest of her family to Easter services at the local church.

A Note on the Title

The title of The Sound and the Fury refers to a line from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth, a Scottish general and nobleman, learns of his wife’s suicide and feels that his life is crumbling into chaos. In addition to Faulkner’s title, we can find several of the novel’s important motifs in Macbeth’s short soliloquy in Act V, scene v:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. 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.
(V.v.18–27)

The Sound and the Fury literally begins as a “tale / Told by an idiot,” as the first chapter is narrated by the mentally disabled Benjy. The novel’s central concerns include time, much like Macbeth’s “[t]omorrow, and tomorrow”; death, recalling Macbeth’s “dusty death”; and nothingness and disintegration, a clear reference to Macbeth’s lament that life “[s]ignif[ies] nothing.” Additionally, Quentin is haunted by the sense that the Compson family has disintegrated to a mere shadow of its former greatness.

In his soliloquy, Macbeth implies that life is but a shadow of the past and that a modern man, like himself, is unable to achieve anything near the greatness of the past. Faulkner reinterprets this idea, implying that if man does not choose to take his own life, as Quentin does, the only alternatives are to become either a cynic and materialist like Jason, or an idiot like Benjy, unable to see life as anything more than a meaningless series of images, sounds, and memories.

According to this summary, which one is FALSE?

The author is William Faulkner.
It is a novel.
It was written in 1929.
It’s modernist.
Techniques: stream of consciousness, intertextuality, no chronological order.
The main theme is the deterioration of the Southern aristocratic class after the American Civil War.
Each chapter corresponds to a different narration. The first chapter is narrated by Benjy in April 1928. The second chapter is narrated by Quentin in June 1910. The third chapter is narrated by Jason, in April 1928. The fourth chapter is not narrated by any of the Brothers and it focuses on Dilsey, the Compson’s “Negro”cook.
The Brothers are obsessed with their sister Cady, who takes care of them as if she were their mother, but who starts having a promiscuous behaviour and ends up pregnant.
Quentin kills himself because of Cady.
Cady’s baby, Miss Quentin, is not raised by Caddy.
Since the war, the Compsons have lost their wealth.
Mr. Compson is an alcoholic.
Mrs. Compson is self-absorbed and depends on Dilsey to raise her four children.
Quentin is the oldest child.
Caddy is the only girl.
Jason has been difficult since birth.
Benjy is mentally disabled, an “idiot” with no understanding of the concepts of time or morality.
Benjy being an “idiot” is a reference to William Shakeaspear’s Macbeth.
In Macbeth, “It is a tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/signifying nothing” representes perfectly Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
“Full of sound and fury” means full of non related ideas, full of words (“sounds”), and a lot of pathos (fury), but no logos (signifying nothing). This “signifying nothing” doesn’t really mean that it doesn’t have any meaning on its own, but that it represents the lack of meaning in a decadent society.
Faulkner’s novel’s meaning can be summarized as this: if a man does not have the courage to take his own life (to commit suicide), he only has to alternatives: either become a cynic and materialist person like Jason, or to become an idiot like Benjy, unable to see life as more than images, sounds and memories.
The novel is a very important play.

Your next clue is hidden in:

6^th word: 3^rd letter + letter before this alternative + 5^th word: 3^rd letter + 3^rd word: last letter + 1^st word: last letter.

Kudos! You have found your second clue. Here it is:

3 (hidden in the purse)

KUDOS!!! You have found your third and final clue! The treasure is hidden in:

Puzzle: “Sometimes it’s empty, sometimes it’s full. When it’s empty, no candy for me, not even for you”.

Didn’t find it? So, solve the following puzzle:

First author: First name: First letter minus 4 letters

the only vowel not present in any of the author’s names

third letter of the alphabet

Second author: Second name: 5^th letter.

First author: second letter.

First author: first letter.

4 (hidden in the pocket)

TREASURE: KUDOS!

You have just received the best treasure someone can receive: knowledge!!

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