Qualley thoughts, 1997

One of the passages that I focused on was, "In each situation, during the dialectical process of trying to comprehend or understand an other, one's own beliefs and assumptions are disclosed, and may themselves become the object of interpretation, critique, and even metamorphosis. It is this risk of alteration to one's view of the world that makes this kind of reading dangerous, but also valuable. If the reader is not at risk, his or her current understanding and (self) awareness remain safely immune to further complication or illumination." 61 This section reminds me of a discussion in class this spring. When I asked my students if it was wrong to kill another human being, they said no. And yet as we approached the end to Of Mice and Men where George shoots Lennie, they were not as definite. Students could see the "other." Though many students have strong religious backgrounds, though they loved Lennie, though they said no at the beginning of the text, now they were waffling. Would it be better if Curley got ahold of Lennie? Would Lennie be better off in prison without George?Would loneliness and solitude, an essence of which the book wrestles with, be better for Lennie? Is Lennie a danger to society? Might he accidentally kill another being since his patterns do show escalation? Students were conflicted because they wanted to argue that murder is wrong, that is what they have always known to be true and yet with Lennie that certainty is clouded. That book makes my student reader's take a risk. Their current understandings must take into account this reading, and then they have to go back to their beliefs and wrestle with these new questions. When we left class, the students didn't know, I didn't know, and I thought it was one of our best classes ever. It was a wonderful class because I know they were thinking. And now I know that according to Qualley the were experiencing a moment of suspended closure. It was a moment to be appreciated and celebrated and complicated.