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Rebecca Study Guide Questions (Chapters 1-3) Essay examples

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Ezra Nugiel
Ms. Rocchino
English 2H, Period C
Rebecca Study Guide: Chapters 1-3
Chapter 1
1. Describe the setting of the narrator’s dream: the house, the drive, the plant life, the general atmosphere. The narrator opens the novel with the line “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” At Manderley, there is an “iron gate leading to the drive”. Upon this gate there is a “padlock and chain”. The gate’s spokes are “rusted” and the lodge further down the drive is “uninhabited”. There is “no smoke” coming from the chimney of the lodge and the “little lattice” windows are open and abandoned. The drive winds, twists, and turns, however it is different than the narrator remembers. It is now “narrow and unkempt”. The drive’s “gravel …show more content…

Consider the opening line. Do you sense that the narrator is relived or yearning for something she can never have again? Explain why you feel the way you do. The narrator can “never go back” to Manderley because “the past is still too close” to her. The things that she and Maxim have tried to put behind them “would stir again”. There would be a “sense of fear, or furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic”. I sense that the narrator yearns for something she can never have again. She beings to talk about the current circumstances that prevent her from going back such as “the past is still too close to us”. This suggests that she is looking forward to a time where the past won’t be too close because she indeed wants to return to Manderley. The extensive description of Manderley in Chapter 1 also suggests that she felt more comfortable there as opposed to her current life. Although she endured awful things at Manderley, she yearns to return to a place and time where she didn’t have such painful memories, and that was at Manderley.
2. What impression do you get of Maxim in the third paragraph of chapter 2? He looks “lost and puzzled”. All expression “died away from his dear face as though swept clean by an unseen hand”. Where this expression has left, a “beautiful”

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