We Have Always Lived In The Castle: 1

P 17 "Their tongues will burn, I thought, as though they had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires. "Goodbye Merricat," they called as I went by the end of the fence, "don't hurry back." "Goodbye Merricat, give our love to Connie." "Goodbye, Merricat," but I was at the black rock and there was the gate to our path.

Passage

The first part of the passage is cruel in a way that depicts Merricat as a devil of some sorts. We read the story from her perspective, so we know everything she is thinking about. She clearly hates the villagers, but it's too soon to know if she has a good reason to. In the second part of the passage, the tables have turned and the villagers are mocking Merricat while she is walking home. I did not expect the hatred to be coming from both sides. At first glance I thought the main character was a psychopath, because normal people don't think about others that way. When we keep reading, it becomes clear that the villagers bully Merricat by asking her impolite questions about her family and taunting her. I felt like she didn't deserve to be treated that way, because the villagers didn't even know if she was the one who killed her family. Still, the extremely violent thoughts she occasionally had were certainly weird.

Assignment B

what makes We have always lived in the castle so mysterious is the fact that we don't know everything. The story begins six years after most of the Blackwood family was poisoned, most likely by one of the three remaining family members. Old uncle Julian seems to have forgotten just about anything except what happened on the day of the murder. When Mrs. Wright and Helen Clarke visit the Blackwoods for tea, Julian told the whole story of how the rest of the family was poisoned. He knew every single detail. At that moment I thought this was strange, given how he was senile and couldn't remember anything. During the visit, Merricat and Constance were also acting odd. However, this was not the only time I felt like there was something off about these three. For example, in the last 50 pages Merricat has reminded herself to be kinder to her uncle. My first impression was that she was a psychopath, so her having a hard time remembering to be kinder didn't bode well with me. Another example is uncle Julian asking Constance if he was correct, after explaining a very detailed story that he knew well. Why would he ask Constance if what he said was right, when he knew the story in its entirety?

Foreshadowing

In the beginning of chapter three Merricat said that change was coming, and that nobody but her knew it. Then, she said: "All the omens spoke of change." Merricat tells her sister that she thought she heard her dead family call her, and Constance completely ignores her. It has not been explained what Mary Katherine meant by "change is coming", so I thought this was foreshadowing a big twist in the story.