Tuesday, 29th we continued to study the Fifth Child, we had some comprehension questions.

Here, the answers. (go and read the script posted last time)

§1 : The main characters are shy, unfashionable, conservatives ...

Yet, they considered they are themselves, ordinary people. They don't need to change.

§2 : Elements evoking life in 60's are : "small band", "pounding rythm ... shook", "dressed up, dramatic, bizarre, full of colour", "noisy", "bobbing up and down on revolving" which refers to the born of rock.  It's the descrition of an extravagant society.

The narrator describe the scene as if he were at the party, the technique she use is a travelling of the scene, which is a technique from the cinema to reveal the scene porgressively. Then, she stops on Harriet and David and zooms on them.

Harriet and David had a negative opinion of the others, for them, they faces are "distorted", songs become "screams and grimaces", all is a "forced hecticity". They despise, or scorn, the others.

§3 : During Harriet's description, the narrator's tone is very ironic. He finishes it saying she is better "at home, in a garden", he compares her to a flower with her "flowery dress", but not a a beautiful one, a dry one, as the "case of dried grasses and leaves". Indeed, she looks like an "impressionist picture, or a trick photo", like something not good in a party. She is only here, but "merged in her surrounding". On the whole, she is compared to someone who is easily forgotten, nobody notices she.

§4 : In and after David's description we can find quotations that say they were bound to fall in love : "Both had found who the other was" with the repetition of "both" in many sentences, "she knew his look of watchful apartness mirrored her own" ... They understood each other at first sight.

§5-6 : We learn that David had "one long and difficult affair with a girl" and that he stayed "reluctantly" with that girl who was "all he did not want in a girl". Harriet is a virgin, and actually as David, doesn't like sleeping around. Both jock about the attraction between opposite. To summary, they are looking for true love and, according to them, it's difficult to find it in a party like that : They have an ideal vision of love.

§ 7 : This paragraph is a revolving passage ! In fact, the two lovers, stand at the same moment and leave quietly the party. They first go in an office, then in David's flat. There, they start talking, sometimes kissing and fall peacefully asleep, hand to hand, side to side. They have decided to get marry at spring ! "Why wait ?"

As Romeo and Juliet, and Maria and Tony, the main characters met at a party, fall in love at first sight, and are differents from the others and the outside world. "They were made for each other", that's why they decid to get marry !