How does Sylvia’s and Lizzie’s perspectives on climate change in Weather illustrate contrasting societal approaches to addressing environmental crises?

Discuss in small groups for 15 mins. Designate someone (preferably a “lifeline”) to represent the main points to peers at the end:

1. Weather is a first-person novel, if an unconventional one. The narrative, therefore, issues from an “I.” But who is that “I” addressing? For much of the novel, it feels as if we readers are “overhearing” something private and inner, but starting in Part Five the “you” starts to loom larger. How do you read the pivot towards the second person in the novel, toward us as readers, in effect? How does it change the tone of the novel in the last two sections?
2. The novel form is organized around endings: as with an individual life, we don’t know what the beginning and the middle mean, in some sense, until the end. Lizzie is obsessed with worry about how things will end: her son’s childhood, her marriage, her brother’s mental health, and, well, the state of the entire world. How does the novel negotiate its own ending? How does the ending make you feel? How does the “closure” the novel provides reflect back on its own many references to time and temporality?
3. Religion, or its more informal and secular cousin spirituality, is a theme common to all three texts we’ve read this term. Lizzie approaches religion with a mix of longing and irony throughout the novel, most notably when she and Ben attempt to be Unitarian Universalists. How does religion, or at least a spiritual feeling, return at the end of the novel? What do you think Offill is getting at with the references to sacred feelings and practices as the novel closes?

Think for 2 mins, Pair for 2 mins, Share for a bit:

We’ve done a lot of close reading of literary critical essays this term (with two more to come next week). What skills have you developed? When confronted with the narrow, specialized form of the critical essay, what are you able to do with it, as a reader, that you couldn’t a few months ago? How might this impact your ability as a writer of your own critical essays?