Why, in your judgment, did Parker marry Sarah Ruth? Why did she marryhim?
What will be an ideal response?
- These are puzzling questions, especially the second. The opening sentences of the story state “Parker understood why he had married her—he couldn’t have got her any other way—but he couldn’t understand why he stayed with her now.” Still, this beginning answer seems hardly satisfactory after we learn later that Parker has had involvements with a number of women (from which he seems to have formed the impression that he is devastatingly irresistible) and that he had no intention of ever getting married. At the beginning of the story, Parker is genuinely disgusted and “ashamed” with himself for not being able to leave his pregnant wife: “he stayed as if she had him conjured” (par. 1).
Indeed, this odd couple seems to be grossly mismatched. Although the story suggests they come from similar backgrounds—little education and even less money—they have little else in common. For reasons even he cannot articulate, from their first meeting Sarah Ruth allures Parker in a way that is much more than merely sexual. From a sermon preached by Father Paul Yerger of the Orthodox Church in 2004, which interestingly enough took “Parker’s Back” as its text: “something attracts him to Sarah Ruth; he is hungry for something: to love something greater than himself, to partake of beauty and glory and mystery, like the tattooed man he saw at the fair.”
Harder to understand may be Sarah Ruth’s motive for marrying O. E. Parker. In “The Ultimate Heresy: The Heartless God in ‘Parker’s Back,’” Stephen Sparrow suggests one possibility: “Sarah Ruth is also a girl who, in the manner of most Old Testament women, expected some day to become somebody’s wife, and in spite of O. E.’s naturally crude nature, for her there was a certain amount of attraction in that his name’s initials stood for two Old Testament characters.”
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I know how to scrape paint, I just don’t want to do it. I know how to scrape paint; I just don’t want to do it.
Read and label each element as either correct (COR), a run-on sentence (RO), or a comma splice (CS). Make corrections to eliminate the run-on sentences and comma splices.
__________ translate numbers into shapes, shades, and patterns
Fill in the blank(s) with correct word
The two main types of instructions are
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