CAN-AVID NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

CAN-AVID, EASTERN SAMAR

BOOK
REPORT
Submitted by:

ESON B. HIC
Grade 11 - St. Therese
TITLE: Dead Stars

AUTHOR: Paz Marquez Benitez

SETTINGS: The setting of the short story Dead Star are various:
 Calle Real
 House of Judge Del Valle
 Sta. Cruz
 House of Don Julian in Tanda
 House of Don Julian

CHARACTERS:
 ALFREDO SALAZAR: He is the son of Don Julian. He is over thirty years old bachelor. Alfred Salazar believes in
true love and optimism to discover ecstasy in its stir. Esperanza is the first woman he falls in love with. After
their engagement, he falls in love with Julia Salas.
 ESPERANZA: She is the wife of Alfredo Salazar. Esperanza is an impassionate woman having strong will and
principles. A homely woman, she is also among the lucky women who have the aptitude for consistent
beauty.
 JULIA SALAS: She is the sister-in-law of Judge Dal Valle, a friend of Alfredo’s father. She is the second woman
with whom Alfredo falls in love. She remains single for her entire life.
 DON JULIAN: He is the father of Alfredo Salazar.
 CARMEN: She is the only sister of Alfredo Salas.
 JUDGE DEL VALLE: He is Julia’s brother-in-law.
 DONNA ADELLA: She is Julia’s sister. A pretty, small, plump woman with a baby complexion.
 CALIXTA: He is a note carrier of Esperanza and Alfredo Salazar.
 DIONISIO: Donna’s husband
 VICENTE: Carmen’s husband
 BRIGIDA SAMUY: The elusive woman whom Alfredo is searching for.

PLOT:
The story of short story Dead Stars revolves around a man, Alfred Salazar, and his affairs. Alfred Salazar believes in
true love and optimism to discover ecstasy in its stir. Esperanza is the first woman he falls in love with.

The families of both of them are acquainted with each other and hence they start a loving relationship. Both get
engaged after three years of their relationship. Alfredo is a lawyer who has strong desires and wants warmth and
compassion, however, Esperanza is an impassionate woman having strong will and principles. Alfredo’s love for her
soon fades away when he meets Julia. Julia, now, becomes a new object of his desire.
Julia Salas is the sister-in-law of the Judge, who is a friend of Alfredo’s father. Julia is an optimistic and enthusiastic
person having her dreams and desires.

When Alfredo comes across her, he is strongly attracted to her. On his visit to her with his father, he engages himself
in conversation with her and is attracted to her charm. Even he is so passionate that he doesn’t disclose his
engagement to Esperanza.
To avoid the discovery of his fiancée, he keeps secrets from Esperanza too. His eyes are doomed when he learns
about Julia’s return to his native town. With the fear of losing her, Alfredo decides to declare his true feeling for Julia.

When the Church’s function ends, Alfredo goes to meet her, though his fiancé is waiting for him. When he reaches
there, he learns that Julia has already known about his engagement to Esperanza. She wishes him for his marriage
and leaves him.
On his return home, he gets a double blow. He finds Esperanza talking to her friend about loyalty and faithfulness.
Alfredo senses a desire to communicate. He supports the reason for craving and choice over dishonesty.

Esperanza soon confesses that she knew about his affair with Julia. In pursuit of his lust and heart’s content, she
encourages him to cancel the wedding. However, the wedding goes ahead as scheduled and Alfred surrenders to
reason.

Near Julia’s native town, Alfred, after eight years, is sent to some work duty. On his visit, he feels nostalgic and cannot
resist his lust for Julia and soon finds an excuse to meet her.

Julia is still single which forces Alfred to dream about starting a new life with her; however, he soon realizes that
everything is not the same as it was before. Moreover, Julia has also changed and lost something.

COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS:
The short story Dead Stars, written in 1925 has a significant place in Philippine English Literature as it gives birth to
modern English writing in the Philippines. At that time, English was newly introduced and the writers were struggling
hard while using English as a medium of expression.

Dead Stars is the masterpiece of Paz Marque Benitez. In this short story, he didn’t only talk about love. His writing is
significant as it reflects the spirit of the time. It depicts the language, norms, and manners of the people during that
time. The readers are enabled to understand how marriage, fidelity, and courtship were viewed during the early
twentieth century. This serves as a mode to compare the past and the present, and the fading traditional culture and
the predominating modern culture.

The short story also illustrates the rising conjunction of sociopolitical feminism. In this story, women are represented
as meek and dependent on men. Men are considered to be superior to women. Women are faithful and easily in love
while the male is shown as uncertain, inconsistent, and rational. However, the story also ruined the concept of a
patriarchal society as it sees the man as rational and logical while women as emotional and kind.

TITLE: The Gift of the Magi

AUTHOR: O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

SETTINGS:
It takes place at Christmas time inside a modest apartment in New York City.

CHARACTERS:
The story tells of a young married couple, James, known as Jim, and Della Dillingham.

PLOT:
It is Christmas Eve. Jim and Della are a married couple living in a modest furnished flat in New York. They have little
money. The story opens with Della upset because she has just one dollar and eighty-seven cents to spend on a
Christmas present for her husband.

The narrator tells us the married couple each has a possession in which they take great pride. For Jim, it’s a gold
watch that had been his father’s and, before that, his grandfather’s. Della’s prized possession is her beautiful hair.

Della goes to a woman who deals in hair goods. This woman agrees to buy Della’s hair for twenty dollars. With the
newly acquired money, Della goes to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim’s gold watch. This costs her twenty-one dollars,
leaving her just eighty-seven cents in the whole world. When she gets home, she sets about curling what’s left of her
hair so it looks presentable.

When Jim gets home, he is surprised by his wife’s actions, but when she explains why she had her hair cut off, he
embraces her and gives her the present he has bought her: two jeweled tortoiseshell combs she has long admired in
a shop window. The combs are useless to her until her hair grows out again, but at least she can give Jim his present
…

But in a last twist, Jim tells Della that he sold his gold watch to pay for the expensive combs he bought for her. So
now, she has two combs but no hair to use them on, and he has a platinum fob chain for a gold watch he no longer
owns.

COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS:
The Gift of the Magi is a classic example of irony in literature. Irony is a literary technique in which an expectation of
what is supposed to occur differs greatly from the actual outcome. In this case, Jim and Della sacrifice their most
treasured possessions so that the other can fully enjoy his or her gift. Jim sells his watch to buy Della's combs,
expecting her to be able to use them. Della sells her hair to buy Jim a chain for his watch. Neither expects the other to
have made that sacrifice.

The irony here works both on a practical and on a deeper, more sentimental level. Both Della and Jim buy each other
a gift that ultimately seems financially foolish. Being poor, they can't afford to waste money on things they can't use.
However, what they get is something they don't expect: a more intangible gift that reminds them how much they
love each other and are willing to sacrifice to make each other happy.

The story's setting at Christmas time makes it a popular story for the holiday season. Its major theme is the difference
between wisdom and foolishness, or having or not having, a sense of judgment and understanding.

Both Jim and Della behave impulsively, sacrificing their greatest treasures without thinking about the consequences
and focusing instead on making one another happy. From an entirely practical perspective, this doesn't make much
sense because they can't enjoy the gifts that are supposed to make them happy.
TITLE: The Tell-Tale Heart

AUTHOR: Edgar Allan Poe

SETTINGS: Old Apartment Building

CHARACTERS:
 Unnamed narrator. The murderer of the old man. Addressing the reader, the narrator offers his tale of
precise murder and dismemberment as an argument for his sanity.
 Old man. The narrator’s murder victim. The narrator’s obsession with the old man’s one vulture eye indicates
the insanity that the narrator wants to deny.

PLOT:
An unnamed narrator opens the story by addressing the reader and claiming that he is nervous but not mad. He says
that he is going to tell a story in which he will defend his sanity yet confess to having killed an old man. His motivation
was neither passion nor desire for money, but rather a fear of the man’s pale blue eye. Again, he insists that he is not
crazy because his cool and measured actions, though criminal, are not those of a madman.

Every night, he went to the old man’s apartment and secretly observed the man sleeping. In the morning, he would
behave as if everything were normal. After a week of this activity, the narrator decides, somewhat randomly, that the
time is right actually to kill the old man.

When the narrator arrives late on the eighth night, though, the old man wakes up and cries out. The narrator remains
still, stalking the old man as he sits awake and frightened. The narrator understands how frightened the old man is,
having also experienced the lonely terrors of the night. Soon, the narrator hears a dull pounding that he interprets as
the old man’s terrified heartbeat. Worried that a neighbor might hear the loud thumping, he attacks and kills the old
man. He then dismembers the body and hides the pieces below the floorboards in the bedroom. He is careful not to
leave even a drop of blood on the floor. As he finishes his job, a clock strikes the hour of four. At the same time, the
narrator hears a knock at the street door. The police arrived, having been called by a neighbor who heard the old man
shriek. The narrator is careful to be chatty and to appear normal. He leads the officers all over the house without
acting suspiciously. At the height of his bravado, he even brings them into the old man’s bedroom to sit down and
talk at the scene of the crime. The policemen do not suspect a thing.

The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear a low thumping sound. He recognizes the low sound as the heart of
the old man, pounding away beneath the floorboards. He panics, believing that the policemen must also hear the
sound and know his guilt. Driven mad by the idea that they are mocking his agony with their pleasant chatter, he
confesses to the crime and shrieks at the men to rip up the floorboards.

COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS:
Poe uses his words economically in the “Tell-Tale Heart”—it is one of his shortest stories—to provide a study of
paranoia and mental deterioration. Poe strips the story of excess detail as a way to heighten the murderer’s
obsession with specific and unadorned entities: the old man’s eye, the heartbeat, and his claim to sanity. Poe’s
economic style and pointed language thus contribute to the narrative content, and perhaps this association of form
and content truly exemplifies paranoia. Even Poe himself, like the beating heart, is complicit in the plot to catch the
narrator in his evil game.

As a study of paranoia, this story illuminates the psychological contradictions that contribute to a murderous profile.
For example, the narrator admits, in the first sentence, to being dreadfully nervous, yet he is unable to comprehend
why he should be thought mad. He articulates his self-defense against madness in terms of heightened sensory
capacity. Unlike the similarly nervous and hypersensitive Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” who
admits that he feels mentally unwell, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” views his hypersensitivity as proof of his
sanity, not a symptom of madness. This special knowledge enables the narrator to tell this tale in a precise and
complete manner, and he uses the stylistic tools of narration for his sanity plea. However, what makes this narrator
mad—and most unlike Poe—is that he fails to comprehend the coupling of narrative form and content. He masters
precise form, but he unwittingly lays out a tale of murder that betrays the madness he wants to deny.

Another contradiction central to the story involves the tension between the narrator’s capacities for love and hate.
Poe explores here a psychological mystery—that people sometimes harm those whom they love or need in their lives.
Poe examines this paradox half a century before Sigmund Freud made it a leading concept in his theories of the mind.
Poe’s narrator loves the old man. He is not greedy for the old man’s wealth, nor vengeful because of any slight. The
narrator thus eliminates motives that might normally inspire such a violent murder. As he proclaims his sanity, the
narrator fixates on the old man’s vulture eye. He reduces the old man to the pale blue of his eye in an obsessive
fashion. He wants to separate the man from his “Evil Eye” so he can spare the man the burden of guilt that he
attributes to the eye itself. The narrator fails to see that the eye is the “I” of the old man, an inherent part of his
identity that cannot be isolated as the narrator perversely imagines.

The murder of the old man illustrates the extent to which the narrator separates the old man’s identity from his
physical eye. The narrator sees the eye as completely separate from the man, and as a result, he is capable of
murdering him while maintaining that he loves him. The narrator’s desire to eradicate the man’s eye motivates his
murder, but the narrator does not acknowledge that this act will end the man’s life. By dismembering his victim, the
narrator further deprives the old man of his humanity. The narrator confirms his conception of the old man’s eye as
separate from the man by ending the man altogether and turning him into so many parts. That strategy turns against
him when his mind imagines other parts of the old man’s body working against him.

The narrator’s newly heightened sensitivity to sound ultimately overcomes him, as he proves unwilling or unable to
distinguish between real and imagined sounds. Because of his warped sense of reality, he obsesses over the low
beats of the man’s heart yet shows little concern about the man’s shrieks, which are loud enough both to attract a
neighbor’s attention and to draw the police to the scene of the crime. The police do not perform a traditional,
judgmental role in this story. Ironically, they aren’t terrifying agents of authority or brutality. Poe’s interest is less in
external forms of power than in the power that pathologies of the mind can hold over an individual. The narrator’s
paranoia and guilt make it inevitable that he will give himself away. The police arrive on the scene to allow him to
betray himself. The more the narrator proclaims his cool manner, the more he cannot escape the beating of his own
heart, which he mistakes for the beating of the old man’s heart. As he confesses to the crime in the final sentence, he
addresses the policemen as “[v]illains,” indicating his inability to distinguish between their real identity and his
villainy.

TITLE: The Lottery

AUTHOR: Shirley Jackson

SETTINGS: On June 27 in a small town

CHARACTERS:
 Tessie Hutchinson. The unlucky loser of the lottery. Tessie draws the paper with the black mark on it and is
stoned to death. She is excited about the lottery and fully willing to participate every year, but when her
 family’s name is drawn, she protests that the lottery isn’t fair. Tessie arrives at the village square late because
she forgot what day it was.
 Old Man Warner. The oldest man in the village. Old Man Warner has participated in seventy-seven lotteries.
He condemns the young people in other villages who have stopped holding lotteries, believing that the
lottery keeps people from returning to a barbaric state.
 Mr. Summers. The man who conducts the lottery. Mr. Summers prepares the slips of paper that go into the
black box and calls the names of the people who draw the papers. The childless owner of a coal company, he
is one of the village leaders.
 Bill Hutchinson. Tessie’s husband. Bill first draws the marked paper, but he picks a blank paper during the
second drawing. He is fully willing to show everyone that his wife, Tessie, has drawn the marked paper.
 Mr. Harry Graves. The postmaster. Mr. Graves helps Mr. Summers prepare the papers for the lottery and
assists him during the ritual.

PLOT:
The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a beautiful day, for the town lottery. In other
towns, the lottery takes longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery takes only two hours.
Village children, who have just finished school for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in
their pockets and make a pile in the square. Men gather next, followed by the women. Parents call their children
over, and families stand together.

Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot of time to do things for the village. He arrives in the square with
the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. This black box isn’t the original box used for the lottery
because the original was lost many years ago, even before the town elder, Old Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers
always suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but no one wants to fool around with
tradition. Mr. Summers did, however, convince the villagers to replace the traditional wood chips with slips of paper.

Mr. Summers mixes up the slips of paper in the box. He and Mr. Graves made the papers the night before and then
locked up the box at Mr. Summers’s coal company. Before the lottery can begin, they make a list of all the families
and households in the village. Mr. Summers is sworn in. Some people remember that in the past there used to be a
song and salute, but these have been lost.

Tessie Hutchinson joins the crowd, flustered because she had forgotten that today was the day of the lottery. She
joins her husband and children at the front of the crowd, and people joke about her late arrival. Mr. Summers asks
whether anyone is absent, and the crowd responds that Dunbar isn’t there. Mr. Summers asks who will draw for
Dunbar, and Mrs. Dunbar says she will because she doesn’t have a son who’s old enough to do it for her. Mr.
Summers asks whether the Watson boy will draw, and he answers that he will. Mr. Summers then asks to make sure
that Old Man Warner is there too.

Mr. Summers reminds everyone about the lottery’s rules: he’ll read names, and the family heads come up and draw a
slip of paper. No one should look at the paper until everyone has drawn. He calls all the names, greeting each person
as they come up to draw a paper. Mr. Adams tells Old Man Warner that people in the north village might stop the
lottery, and Old Man Warner ridicules young people. He says that giving up the lottery could lead to a return to living
in caves. Mrs. Adams says the lottery has already been given up in other villages, and Old Man Warner says that’s
“nothing but trouble.”

Mr. Summers finishes calling names, and everyone opens his or her papers. Word quickly gets around that Bill
Hutchinson has “got it.” Tessie argues that it wasn’t fair because Bill didn’t have enough time to select a paper. Mr.
Summers asks whether there are any other households in the Hutchinson family, and Bill says no because his married
daughter draws with her husband’s family. Mr. Summers asks how many kids Bill has, and he answers that he has
three. Tessie protests again that the lottery wasn’t fair.

Mr. Graves dumps the papers out of the box onto the ground and then puts five papers in for the Hutchinsons. As Mr.
Summers calls their names, each member of the family comes up and draws a paper. When they open their slips,
they find that Tessie has drawn the paper with the black dot on it. Mr. Summers instructs everyone to hurry up.

The villagers grab stones and run toward Tessie, who stands in a clearing in the middle of the crowd. Tessie says it’s
not fair and is hit in the head with a stone. Everyone begins throwing stones at her.

COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS:
‘The Lottery’ forces us to address some unpleasant aspects of human nature, such as people’s obedience to authority
and tradition and their willingness to carry out evil acts in the name of superstition.

TITLE: The Lady or the Tiger?

AUTHOR: Frank R. Stockton

SETTINGS:
The reader isn’t quite sure where the story takes place. All we know is that it takes place in a kingdom in “the very
olden time”, much like a fairy tale, or other stories like it.

CHARACTERS:
  The King. A king from long ago. The king is described as partially barbaric and partially civilized. He is good to
his subjects, and he also likes to put things right when they have gone wrong. He believes his system of
justice is a good one and enforces it in every situation he faces.
 The princess. The king’s daughter. The princess could be seen as the protagonist of the story since she is the
one who must decide if her lover lives or dies. The princess is semi-barbaric like her father. Though she is
genuinely distraught at the prospect of her lover’s death, she is also fiercely jealous at the thought of losing
her lover in marriage to another woman.
 The young man. The princess’s lover. The young man is described as beautiful and tall, but he is also of low
social standing.
 The lady. The king’s potential offering to the princess’s lover. The lady is described as one of the most
beautiful women in the whole kingdom. It is made clear that the young man would be satisfied and even
quite happy to marry her.

PLOT:
The story begins by introducing a king in an unnamed kingdom who was considered fairly barbaric but loved to live an
exuberant lifestyle, throwing lavish parties and spending tons of money. He was also extremely authoritative, and the
townsfolk and nobles knew not to cross him. He is described in the story as "bland and genial" and whenever things
weren't quite right, he was "even more bland and genial" because he thrived in chaos.

He was a fan of the public arena and often held "exhibitions of manly and beastly valor". One of the more barbaric
exhibitions that he often held in these arenas was his idea of poetic justice. When someone was accused of a crime
that the king deemed sufficient, he would invite the entire kingdom to the arena and put on a production.

In the arena, there were two doors. Behind one door was a viscous and hungry tiger. Behind the other door was a
beautiful woman that the king himself had chosen. The two doors were exactly alike in every single way so there was
no way to tell which door held which fate.

The accused was given the charge to pick up and open the door. If he chooses the door with the tiger, he is eaten
there in front of everyone. If he chooses the woman, they are immediately married and sent off to start their new life.
The idea is to allow fate but also the accused to choose his future. While it was barbaric, it was deemed fair, and the
practice was very popular among the subjects.

COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS:
This story made me tensed. The situation in the story is breathtaking, I mean the situation is intense! It is between life
and death!

I admire the story in how it is written and all I can say is it is “masterfully told”. I like the way the author left a
question at the end and I know that it will surely attack the curiosity of all the readers.

Aside from the princess's decision, I also can’t help but ask myself… “If I would be the princess, am I going to let my
jealousy take over?” If so, I would be the most selfish person who lives. My curiosity kills me. Now, I have the desire
to continue this story.

If I would predict, I think the lady will get out from that right door. I have the confidence that the princess loved the
man that’s why I think that she is willing to sacrifice for the sake of her lover. As an optimistic person, I would say that
their love story won’t just end like that. It doesn’t mean that if the man chose the lady, he will love the lady.
Someday, there will be a way for them to continue what has already been started.