preview

How Does Gryphon By Charles Baxter Present Miss Ferenczi

Decent Essays

The short story Gryphon by Charles Baxter talks about a fourth grade boy named Tommy who has a substitute teacher, and how all the students think she is different from the other substitute teachers. Most of the students grow attached to Miss Ferenczi, even though she talks about random facts .Even if something is incorrect Miss Ferenczi is fine with it. Tommy especially is fond of her and when she leaves he is enraged. I think that Tommy believes and doesn’t believe Miss Ferenczi. I assume Tommy believes all the physical things that Miss Ferenczi talked about, but not much about the mythical beliefs, such as the Gryphon. I believe that Tommy’s feelings toward Miss Ferenczi are that Tommy thinks of Miss Ferenczi as a close relative. A example of Tommy believing is, “I saw a tree.” (Baxter L606) “There’s a tree that’s …. that I’ve seen….” (Baxter L610) When Tommy says he has seen this tree before, I infer that he remembers that Miss Ferenczi drew the same tree on the board;she must have seen it somewhere, so Tommy knows that Miss Ferenczi is not randomly drawing this tree. You could argue that drawing a tree that looked like a tree in real life is just a coincidence, but I don’t …show more content…

“After five minutes I found it: Gryphon: “variant of griffin.” Griffin: “a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion.”” (Baxter L490-495) If Tommy believed Miss Ferenczi, why would he want to go search it up in the dictionary? He doubted what Miss Ferenczi said. The gryphon is a mythical creature and as I said before Tommy doubted her so he searched it up in the dictionary, so he doesn’t believe Miss Ferenczi. At this point of time when Tommy looks up the word gryphon in the dictionary he doesn’t believe Miss Ferenczi but after searching up the word gryphon Tommy leads to believe the fact that gryphons is defined in the

Get Access