Part 1 : Summary, Reading for and Value Graph
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds is a fiction novel written in free verse that takes place almost entirely in a sixty second elevator ride. The novel is told by the main character, Will, a fifteen year old boy whose brother was shot and killed. The novel begins by addressing the reader,
My name is Will. William. William Holloman. But to my friends and people who know me know me, just Will. So call me Will, because after I tell you what I’m about to tell you you’ll either want to be my friend or not want to be my friend at all. Either way, you’ll know me- know me. (2)
Will begins to explain that he is in shock and tells us he has yet to say the words out loud of what happened to his older brother. On the following page Will repeats the words
Shawn’s dead. Shawn’s dead. It is strange to say (8)
and while repeating himself, he begins to realise he is not actually shocked, he realises that he is actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Will explains the rules in his neighborhood: No. 1 don’t cry- no matter what, No. 2 no snitching and No. 3 seek revenge. If someone you love gets killed, find the person who killed them and kill them. (31)
Will dug through Shawn’s dresser, knowing that he had a gun hidden somewhere in their shared bedroom. When he found the gun in the middle drawer he tucked it into his pants. Will explains in a list how he thought he knew who killed his brother Shawn. He explained that there is this man known as Riggs who is from a different part of the hood where the gang Dark Suns would hangout and Shawn was on their turf at a corner store getting his mom a special soap for her eczema the day of the shooting. Will says that when someone steps over those boundaries in his neighborhood, it is kill or be killed. Lastly, Will explains that you just always know the killer, way before the cops. Following the rules, Will gets on the apartments elevator ready to kill this man Riggs. The elevator stops on each floor on his way down, each time a friend or relative that was killed appears and tells Will their story about how each their murders played out. Each person from the past tells Will he does not need to follow the rules anymore. Will begins to asks do I have to do this, am I going to listen to the ghosts, do I believe in ghosts now? The last person to appear in the elevator was his brother Shawn, who was the only ghost who did not speak a word until the elevator door opens and Shawn asks are you coming.
Mckee says,
Expressing an idea, in the sense of exposing it, is never enough. The audience must not just understand; it must believe. You want the world to leave your story convinced that yours is a truthful metaphor for life. And the means by which you bring the audience to your point of view resides in the very design you give your telling.
As we moved through each book I felt like I was able to dance a little better to the music. Meaning, by the time we got to my book I felt as if I had this moment (on my long drive to campus) of thinking of this premise of every person – including myself being in different recurring cycles like the main character Will was in. Even avoiding a cycle – is in fact a cycle in itself. Which in this moment, as I am trying this brings to life my cycle of avoiding reading previously. [ mind – just – blown ] This course broke my recurring cycle of attempting to avoid reading deeply and critically and now I’m realizing I am more like the character Will than I ever realized I could be.
| Premise : What happens if you’re stuck in an endless cycle? |
| Purpose of the controlling value : If you have no values nothing in life will have meaning to you. | Purpose of the Opposing Controlling Value: Even if you break the rules – they will always control you |
| Context : When you live in an environment that controls your values – you become stuck in an endless cycle of making choices based on what people have previously done | Conext : To begin to change the rules you must break them |
Value Graph
(-) Shawn was shot and killed
(-) Will has to hold back his emotions to follow the rule – no crying
(+) Will finds Shawn’s gun and gets on the elevator to do what he knows needs to be done
(-) Elevator stop the ghost of Buck comes on
(-) Buck points out that Will doesn’t know how to use a gun
(+) Buck teaches Will how to use the gun
(+) Buck tells Will he does not have to follow the rules, he does not have to go murder someone
(-) Will questions himself, the rules and everything he knows about what he should do
Part 2 : Form and Genre
The recurring situation in the world that calls for the genre to exist is this recurring violence and crime. Will lives in a neighborhood with gangs that live by this kill or be killed way of life. Will lives by these rules in which he explains I don’t know who made these rules, Shawn didn’t, my dad didn’t, my uncle didn’t – I just know I have to follow them. (40) Burke explains this as the repetitive form which is the constant maintaining of principle under new guises. It is reinstatement of the same thing in different ways.
As I previously said, this novel is written in free verse, in addition some of the pages are written in form, creating a visually interesting arrangement of words. One page is just the word right repeated over 30 times in the form of a question mark on the page- this the end of the novel when Will is questioning what he is about to do when he steps out of the elevator with the gun tucked into the back of his pants. Reynold’s also uses word and line spacing strategically
He positioned the cig
In the corner of his mouth,
Patted his pockets
For fire.
The end?
He murmured,
Looking at Buck,
Motioning for a light.
It’s never the end, (106)
Something I learned by Professor Budris this semester in my poetry course – when a word is repeated in a poem it emphasized that word and when adding small details to a person, in this case something in someone’s mouth or how they speak, adds specific strategic characterises to the person. On this page end is repeated twice, first in a question then in an answer. This question – answer in such a quick verse makes an almost panic feeling to the words. In doing this Will expresses that he knows this cycle will never end, if he murders his brothers killer then Will is next in line to be killed. If Will chooses to not kill his brother’s killer, the result will be that Will is killed for not following the rules. This reinforces my controlling value of even if you break the rules, they will always control you.
Part 3 : Intertextual Codes
Another thing about the rules: They weren’t meant to be broken. They were meant for the broken to follow. (81)
Silverman explains the proairetic code as it has no logic other than that of the “already-done” or “already-written”; and the proairetic code determines the sequence of events within a story. It is the “glue” which makes certain that clusters of events will follow each other in a predictable order.
The proairetic code is evident not only within the community’s rules of murder to then be killed but also within Will’s ride down the elevator. The first time the elevator stops it is Buck, his brother’s oldest friend who was like family to Shawn who explained that he was the one who gave Shawn that gun and began to show Will how to use it. The next time the elevators stops and it’s Dani who he meets, a childhood friend who was killed. The third time the elevator stops it is his Uncle Mark who he meets who was also killed. This already- done or already- written story down the elevator ride continues to follow at each stop until the last stop. The last person Will meets is his brother Shawn, the novel ends without directly telling what Will decided to do. He either follows the rules and kills Riggs, then is murdered or doesn’t follow the rules and gets murdered. Either way – Will is dead.
In conjunction with the proairetic code, this neighborhood and way of living is also part of the cultural codes. Barthes establishes a direct connection between the cultural codes and that larger discursive field which we have identified with the symbolic order. He suggests that the cultural codes function not only to organize but to naturalize that field—to make it seem timeless and inevitable. They also assure that future textual production will be congruent with what has gone before. The symbolic code is also demonstrated in that Will is torn between going the way of those before him; of avenging his brother’s death and eventually being murdered himself or choosing not to seek revenge against the person who killed his brother and attempting to pursue the path of peace. I thought that this intersection between the cultural and symbolic codes was very interesting, especially because in Will’s situation, even if he did make the decision to forgo violence in favor of peace, there was no guarantee that he would obtain in because of the dangerous environment he lives in.
Part 4 : Rhetoric of Narrative
The author Jason Reynolds, dedicates the novel to All the young brothers and sisters in detention centers around the country, the ones I’ve seen and the ones I haven’t. You are loved. In doing so I believe part of Reynold’s reason for writing this novel was to shed like on the children that are raised in environments like Will and follow the norm or the rules of their community which results to violence and feeling like this is the only option for them. This is the first attempt at shaping his authorial or hypothetical audience. Rabinowitz explains that: [An author] cannot write without making certain assumptions about his readers’ beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions…Since the structure of a novel is designed for the author’s authorial audience, we must, as we read, come to share, in some measure, the characteristics of this audience if we are to understand the text.
In Kassidy’s blog she says, Reynolds made assumptions about his hypothetical audience while drafting his novel; one of the assumptions being that readers would be willing to sit in the chair of the idea that not all children in detention centers are “bad” kids, but that some have just been raised in such a way that it became their only path. I have to agree with her point of view here and in doing so I don’t think that children are “bad” because of their family or how they are raised but rather because it is all they know- it’s all they have been exposed to. For me, personally, it wasn’t all that difficult to bridge the gap between myself and Reynolds’ authorial audience, it was very easy to look at Will’s story and understand that he had never known any life other than one of violence, having lost his father, uncle, brother, and childhood best friend to gun violence, so the only logical progression was that he would eventually commit an act of violence himself. Rabinowitz describes it as, The flesh-and-blood people who read the book…It is the only audience which is entirely “real,” and the only one over which the author has no guaranteed control. Kassidy also pointed out one of the most interesting ideas of what if Will is dead which would explain why Will sees and talks to the ghosts. If this were to be true that means the narrative audience is “you,” but you represents the person Will is trying to save and provide a second chance, which in this case, is the person who is planning on avenging his death.
Final Reflection
I can describe my learning process this semester a lot like a SpongeBob episode when he’s told to only keep what he knows about fine dining and burn the rest of whatever else he knew about. Prior to this course I described myself as a “nonreader” which looking back sounds a bit silly but realistically outside of academic requirements, I did not have much experience in reading books. This makes me question who was I that I avoided reading novels? I also explained in my reflection over the summer that my teachers in high school would hint, or tell us to watch movies instead of reading the required summer readings. I believe I partially blew a previously professors mind when I told him I never read Shakespeare. In contrast, this almost blank slate of a reader I was prior to this class allowed me to learn new ways of reading without trying to completely rewire my brain. As an early childhood education major, in many ways I had to allow myself to put aside everything I learned about teaching thus far in order to become an active learner in this course. At the end of my summer reflection, I said I will do what I need to succeed. All written coursework, this semester has allowed me to grow into the student who did not work for the numbers or letters on top of an assignment but became an active participant in the classroom who at the very least, attempted to work with the readings in a way that I was always trying to grasp or dance with new ways of reading.
Core Value 1 says that, Writing Arts students will demonstrate understanding of a variety of genre conventions and exhibit rhetorical adaptability in applying those conventions. I was able to demonstrate this by using Jane Gallop’s teaching of “I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out.” When I was deciding on a novel to read I would have categorized Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds as a fiction novel about crime. When it came to reading my novel and looking closely at the words on the page I was able to point out the use of slang in the vocabulary used by the mail character Will at the beginning at the very first page Don’t nobody believe nothing these days which is why I haven’t told nobody the story I’m about to tell you. And truth is, you probably ain’t gon’ believe it either gon’ think I’m lying or I’m losing it, but I’m telling you, this story is true. (1) In addition, the novel is written in free verse allowing for new physical forms of stanzas on each page. This quick turn of a page and the physical formatting of the pages also mimics the novel’s genre conventions in that community Will lives in also has an ongoing cycle. As I read this novel Will meet a new person who was killed, as I turned each page, each of these people have different stories to tell and the words written on the page change formats. While I was reading closely, I was able to understand new genre conventions. I was able to begin to understand deeper connections throughout the semester through reading and working with Demian, A Clockwork Orange, The Secret Scripture and Last Night in Montreal.
Core Value 2 says that, Writing Arts students will understand theories of writing and reading and be able to apply them to their own writing. Throughout this course the theorist that resonated with me the most were Gallop and Mckee. Professors, family members and friends have told me I’m good with using personal experiences in a way that helps others understand ideas. Until I decided to change majors and transfer to Rowan I never thought to adapt therorist’s ideas into a way of learning new ideas. Reading Mckee and working with his process in class of a premise and controlling idea allowed me to use these theroiset and directly apply them into my own writing. Mckee says, Two ideas bracket the creative process: Premise, the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story, and Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax. A Premise, however, unlike a Controlling Idea, is rarely a closed statement. More likely, it’s an open-ended question: What would happen if…? During my groups first attempt in using Mckee’s theory in class with A Clockwork Orange we wrote something on the lines of What if free will isn’t free for our premise and When you are free you could be breaking the law and hurting other people for the controlling idea. Each book we read we were able to take steps with understanding Mckee’s theories more accurately. Our premise and controlling idea for our last book, Long Way Down by Jason Reyonlds was able to show growth from where we started to where are today.
Core Value 3 says that, Writing Arts students will demonstrate the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects. Not to pat myself on the back, but this core value in my opinion has been demonstrated time and time again throughout the semester. As I previously explained, I have not read many books nor would I consider my reading as critical. This course was the first time I slowed down how fast I read each page, took chapter by chapter notes, added to my notes during course discussions and worked with applying theory to practice. Although I wouldn’t consider my abilities as mastery, I allowed myself the time to work with each of the books throughout the semester. The recurrent use of the blog posts allowed for a more critical analysis each time we would enter back into the purpose of each blog post. For me, this constant use of working with value graphs, the reading for, intertextual codes and rhetoric of narrative allowed for a deeper personal growth each day we would work through them.
Katelyn’s Blogs and Comments:
A Clockwork Orange:
Reading for Mimesis and Theme (Jake’s Blog): I commented on October 8th, 2019
Synthetic Register and Genre in a Clockwork Orange (Monica’s Blog): I commented on October 8th, 2019
What’s It Gonna Be Then, Eh? (Kassidy’s Blog): I commented on October 9th, 2019
The Humble Narrator (My Blog): I posted on October 9th, 2019
The Secret Scripture:
A Woman Stuck at 100 (Monica’s Blog): I commented on October 21st, 2019
The Secret Register (Kassidy’s Blog): I commented on October 21st, 2019
Secret Me Too (My Blog): I posted on October 22nd, 2019
The ‘Real’ Secret Scripture (Jake’s Blog): I commented on October 24th, 2019
Last Night in Montreal:
All I Ever Do Is Leave (Kassidy’s Blog): I commented on October 29th, 2019
Living Is A Mystery (My Blog): I posted on October 31st, 2019
Running From Montreal (Jake’s Blog): I commented on November 7th, 2019
Don’t Follow Me, I’m Still Running (Monica’s Blog): I commented on December 3rd, 2019
A Long Way Down:
60 Seconds to Murder (My blog): I posted on November 12th, 2019
A Long Way to Violence (Jake’s Blog): I commented on November 15th, 2019
Follow the Rules or Break the Cycle? (Monica’s Blog): I commented on November 26th, 2019
A Long Way to Freedom (Kassady’s Blog) – I commented on December 2ed, 2019
Works Cited:
Burke, Kenneth. “Lexicon Rhetoricae.” Counter-Statement. 1931. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. 123-183.
Gallop, Jane. “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (Fall, 2000): 7-17.
McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Regan, 1997. 110-131.
Rabinowitz, Peter. “Truth In Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry. 4.1 (1977): 121-141.
Reynolds, Jason. Long Way Down. New York: Atheneum, 2017.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
KKJM Reads 
