Compréhension
1. This is a first person narrative. The narrator is the main character.
"Will Savage and I were thrown together as juniors at prep school […]"
2. The scene takes place at the narrator's prep school.
"[…] strangers to a cold New England Campus […]"
"When the housemaster showed me and my parents to the cell that would be my home for the next academic year […]"
"Your room at home is much nicer […]"
"[…] I was most worried that my roommate would arrive before they left."
3. The scene takes place in 1967 at the beginning of the school year since the students are settling down in their room, the luggage of his roommate being on the floor and unpacked.
4. The characters involved in this passage are the narrator, his father and mother, the roommate of the narrator named Will Savage and the housemaster of the dorm where the students will spend the school year.
5.
a) Will and the narrator come from two different places. The narrator doesn't live far from the school, only 40 miles, and comes from New England. He is a local teenager from the North East whereas Will comes from a much further place that is to say Memphis, 100 miles from the school. He is not a northerner but a southerner since he comes from Tennessee.
b)
Will and the narrator come from two different social backgrounds, they do not belong to the same social classes. On the one hand Will comes from a well-off family who don't have problems to pay the school fees. They may even have made donations to the school as one of the buildings bears the name of the family.
"He was the fifth savage to matriculate, and the observatory bore the name of his maternal grandfather"
On the other hand, the narrator comes from a middle class family. They can pay the school fees but have to make sacrifices to afford their son's education at the prep school.
"I was a scholarship student […]"
"Fathers […] were not supposed to wear checked sports jackets worn shiny at the elbows, nor polyester ties."