Ideas and Prompts for Week Seven: Jasmine

Hi everyone!

Since this will be your last blog post for English/American Studies 248, I'd like to encourage you to have fun with it! Jasmine has many great characters--Jasmine herself, Half-Face, Bud Ripplemeyer, Du, and Taylor, to name a few--and one way to explore the novel's themes is to creatively explore the psychology of a single character. To wit:

• Put Jyoti in dialogue with Jasmine, or with Jane Ripplemeyer. The protagonist's various incarnations, it could be argued, are actually three different characters. Early in the novel, the narrator states: "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams" (29). What would young Jyoti say to her later selves? Or what would Jane have to say to Jasmine or Jyoti, the selves she had "murdered" (29)? You could write this dialogue in the form of a letter, or you could write a story in which the two protagonists meet each other in a dream.
  
  
• Rewrite a segment of the story from Du's perspective. Du, Jane and Bud's adopted Vietnamese son, is one of my favorite characters in the novel. There's lots to explore here: Du's traumatic past, his skill with electronics (a survival skill), his relationship with Jane, his departure from the Ripplemeyer family.
  
  
• Rewrite a segment of the story from Bud Ripplemeyer's perspective. Another fascinating character, Bud is by turns pathetic and sympathetic. His neediness is both endearing and tragic. What would his side of the story look like?
  
  
• Rewrite the ending of Jasmine, in which the protagonist makes a different choice. What if the ending were totally different? (I don't want to get too specific here, so as not to spoil it for you.)
  
  
• Rewrite a segment of the story as a Hindu fable, including gods and goddesses. This will require a bit of research into Kali, Shiva, and some of the other deities mentioned in the book. But it would be super awesome. Which deity would Jyoti be? Jasmine? Jane? What about the other characters?
  

Enjoy!
Dr. K.

The goddess Kali. Source: Jim Lochtefeld, Carthage College