Lesson Overview 

 Quiz

The quiz that I include here has my usual five questions and an extra credit.   If the students haven't read - as usual, they should not get into a Group.  Notice the extra credit: "What other work have we read by this author?"  - Very few students will get this, and I've already admitted, it took me years to realize the answer as well (given how outwardly different the two stories are): "War"

The Group Work

At the bottom of this Group Work are the instructions for the upcoming lesson, a mock trial based on this story.  The Group Work that the students do will actually help them prepare for this - and the teacher can use the time that they are doing the assignment to get volunteers for the two main parts (the lawyer for Don Lollo and the Lawyer for Zi Dima) as well as the other partsj. This is truly my last Group Work - see my page on Group Works for more on that.  Here is a description of the seven questions:

Pirandello’s “The Jar” came at the very end of the year, and its Group Work carries a heading that says what it’s for: “Show me what you can do!” The 1909 story follows Don Lollo, a rich, quarrelsome Sicilian landowner who keeps a law book close at hand and sues at the slightest excuse. When his enormous new oil jar cracks, he hires Zi’ Dima, a mender with a secret cement, and insists on rivets as well. Zi’ Dima, working from inside the jar, ends up sealed in. Don Lollo says that if the jar must be broken to free him, Zi’ Dima will pay for it. Zi’ Dima refuses and stays put. That night the farmhands celebrate around the jar, and Don Lollo, in a rage, kicks it and smashes it himself. The seven questions take this comic story seriously, and nearly every one asks the group to reach back across the whole year.

The opening questions set Don Lollo beside characters from Song of Solomon, using words like “control” and “deserve.” They ask whether a character who seems one-dimensional becomes more real when we see him next to someone like him from another book. That leads to a bigger question about what readers carry into a book and what they take out of it. I tie it to the question I opened my British Literature class with every year, “Why do we read literature?”, and the answer I found in a movie: “To know that we’re not alone.” Groups then argue whose fault it is that Zi’ Dima gets caught in the jar, finding three reasons for their answer and three for blaming someone else, as if they were lawyers. The question on the nature of justice brings in a litigious society that sues ladder makers over warnings and transit companies over a man who climbed a fence to reach a transformer. It then asks whether the jar itself can stand for justice, and whether there is a certain justice in its breaking. Students are told not to go for the easy answer.

The later questions widen the circle. Groups compare the justice Don Lollo wanted, by the book, with the justice he got, and set it against three cases from the year. They can choose Paul’s killing of Jim Kendall in “Haircut,” or Candide marrying Cunégonde after he no longer loves her. They can choose the fake attack O’Brien stages on the medic who panicked in The Things They Carried, or Himmelstoss getting his beating in All Quiet on the Western Front (“revenge is black pudding”). Other choices are Ad Francis in Hemingway’s “The Battler” and the shoebox of Hagar’s hair that Pilate gives Milkman. Another question notices that Don Lollo is alone while everyone else parties. It compares him and Zi’ Dima to the husband and Peduzzi in Hemingway’s “Out of Season,” and to Pilate’s dying wish that she had loved more people. The last question returns to the earlier Pirandello story we read. The two stories have strikingly different tones, yet they share a common thread, and their endings use a similar technique, one that also recalls the ending of “Haircut.”