Snow Falling on Palm Trees Chapter 2: The answers, a lord of the flies fanfic

SPOILER WARNING!

Well, I got some entries for the contest. Here are all the answers. I figured I'd better write them down before I forget what the entire thing means... Don't read any farther if you still want to guess or you think explaining the jokes will make them less funny!

Translation of the parody:

Title: Snow Falling on Palm Trees: Snow Falling on Cedars

Plot is mostly a cross between Macbeth and Lord of the Flies.

Woodchucks flying south: While reading a poem by Robert Frost (I think it was "Apple-picking Time", not sure), we were talking about woodchucks hibernating, and Carey said, "Woodchucks hibernate? I thought they flew south for the winter.." Which, of course, produced a lot of hilarity and some funny drawing of flying woodchucks. She thought he meant woodpeckers.

Tess and Hamlet: two irritatingly tragic characters from Hamlet and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess killed the family horse, which was part of the beginning of the string of unstoppable events that led to her death. Hamlet killed about six people over the course of the play. The sacrificial altar in Tess is symbolized by her laying down at Stonehenge at the end. The pig's head was a sacrifice to the beastie.

Edna Pontellier: In The Awakening, there's a lot of symbolism in the sea. Toward the beginning Edna learns to swim and goes out swimming away from her husband (Leonce), but he tells her at the end that she was safe b/c he was watching her the whole time. At the end she drowns herself.

The conch: the symbol of authority in Lord of the Flies: it is blown to call the children together, and you'll only allowed to speak at a meeting when you're holding the conch. Piggy is adamant about the rules.

"Yesterday...": The man in the kilt is, of course, Macbeth, who kills tons of people (thus the bloody sword). His most famous speech in the play beginnings, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace..." Carey, on a memorization test of the passage, accidentally wrote, "Yesterday and yesterday and yesterday..." Once again, we all thought this was very funny.

Guildenstern: From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. They keep playing the question game, where you can only speak in questions.

Ralph: The original leader of the island in Lord of the Flies.

Horatio: At the end of Hamlet, Hamlet tells Horatio to tell the people what happened. Ray's take on this was, "Horatio.... Tell my story... dies... head pops up--Fortinbras shall be the next king!—dies again. This line cracked us up to write, too.

Congo: Marlowe is the main character in Heart of Darkness, a steamship captain who is sailing down the Congo River.

Holy Albatross: Killed by the "Ancient Mariner", its death brings horrible luck to the crew.

Raskolnikov: In Crime and Punishment, after unending deliberation, he killed the old pawnbroker with an ax because he wanted to test his "extraordinary man" theory, and it was okay to kill her because the world would be a better place without her.

Water: Water is described as warm and sensuous in The Awakening.

Jack: Jack claims he should be in charge of the hunters, who were formerly a choir, because he could hit the highest note. Lord of the Flies.

Macduff Bologna: Okay, this will take some explanation. We live in PA, where deer hunting is very popular. In Macbeth, Macduff's family is murdered, and they're described as being left in a heap of dead people, like a pile of deer. We didn't understand this image, so our teacher said, "Well, you know when you kill a bunch of deer you lay the bodies in a heap." Emily said, "No you don't, you take them home and make bologna out of them!" And I started laughing and said, "Macduff bologna!" and everybody else said, "ewwww!!! Hee hee hee!" So they don't need to hunt for pigs as long as they have Macduff Bologna.

Msimangu: a character in Cry the Beloved Country. That spiel about uniting and surviving was what we decided the theme of the book was. Notice: Macbeth keeps killing things. Character description.

Rosencrantz: Playing the question game again!

Piggy: This is the kind of thing he keeps saying.

Lattice: This particular sentence was made by picking random words out of a dictionary. Ophelia is from Hamlet, and she's nuts.

Ishmael: Journalist from Snow Falling on Cedars.

John Donne: This is a contribution of Ray's and it's absolutely hilarious, but it takes a bit of explanation. Ray was mad because every person Jane meets (Jane Eyre) seems to feel compelled to comment on the fact that she's not pretty. "Hi, Jane, you're really nice, but boy, you're ugly!" This is combined with the fact that John Donne tried to seduce someone by writing a poem about squishing fleas. The man had issues.

Razhumpkin: We read a packet of really bad AP essays, and in one on Crime and Punishment somebody called Razumihin "Razhumpkin", which we found terribly funny. We decided he must be a cross between Razumihin and Rumplestiltzkin.

Edna tells Raskolnikov not to kill her, because if he's sitting thinking, that's probably what he's thinking about.

Electric twang: this is explained later in the Milton part.

Edna refuses to sacrifice her inner being for her children.

Raskolnikov killed the pawnbroker because the world was better off without her.

Hamlet sets up a play (does anybody else find this silly?) to see if Claudius is actually guilty of his father's murder. Bits of the theme and text of Hamlet are strewn through here.

Tess has a guilt complex and believes everything is her fault, even the fact that she was drugged and raped. Angel, her lover, went to Brazil. Everything in Tess is almost fated to happen—one bad thing leads to another etc.

Mersault: from The Stranger. He feels blinded and attacked by the sun and senselessly murders some random guy. He shoots him, then pauses and shoots him four more times. Mersault has no real feelings most of the time.

Gruoch was the given name of the historical Lady Macbeth. We just thought the name was funny.

Etta Heine is Carl Heine's mother in Snow Falling on Cedars. She's racist and thinks Carl should marry a good German girl.

Lady Macbeth basically calls Macbeth a wimp in Shakespeare.

More flying woodchucks. They eat the sharks because in Shakespearean tragedies, particularly Macbeth, weird things happen like a smaller animal eating a larger one because the natural order is in chaos until it gets fixed by the protagonist.

Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, trying to wash the blood off her hands and says, "Out, out, damn spot!"

The witches in Macbeth told him that he couldn't be killed by any man born of woman (Macduff was a C-section) and couldn't be defeated until the woods marched on the castle.

MacDougal: Ray dressed up as a Scotsman, complete with accent, for Halloween and called himself MacDougal. So when our school had a duct tape apparel contest, our class turned him into a duct-taped Scotsman. MacDougal was a very good sport with us taping him into a costume.

"She should've died hereafter" is a famous quote from Macbeth.

Castle Rock: Lord of the Flies

Blueberry muffins: Emily's favorite treat for Friday morning English meetings

Throughout the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ros and Guil flip coins, and they always come up heads.

Piggy (Lord of the Flies) has asthma and always huffs and puffs, plus always wipes his "specs" on his shirt.

When Piggy is told to run he always shrieks, "What about my ass-mar!" And everybody else always answers, "Sucks to your ass-mar!"

The beastie turns out to be Milton (17th century garb, blind). The electric lute and amp are from another inside joke. In "Eve of St. Agnes", the male lead watches his girlfriend undress, while hidden in the closet, then wakes her up by playing the lute in her ear. She is, for some odd reason, enchanted by this. We decided if some pervert watched us undress and then woke us up by bwanging on his stupid electric lute in our ears, we would btch him out and wake up the castle. Milton's constructions are unbelievably long and complicated. A sentence may be more than 10 lines of poetry long, and the subject and verb end up somewhere in the middle of that. It's insane.