Schaefer Introduction to Fiction Fall 2006
First Essay Assignment
Length: 3-4 typed, double-spaced pages
Due: Friday, October 27
As we’ve been discussing throughout the semester thus far, the ultimate purpose of every element of a short story is to provoke us into developing our own understanding of the meaning of that story. With that point in mind, and also the fact that we can’t cover all the elements of fiction in one short essay, what I’m asking you to do for this first assignment is choose one short story that interests you, whether or not we’ve covered it in class, and one of the elements of fiction we’ve covered in class—plot, point of view, character, setting, theme, and symbol—and discuss the role that element plays in helping us understand that story’s meaning. Regarding point of view, for instance, do the attitudes Sammy expresses as he’s telling us his story in “A&P” indicate to you that he has completely matured, partly matured, or remained immature? Regarding character, in what specific ways do we see the narrator of “Cathedral” changing as a result of his encounter with Robert? In what ways do the flat characters in “A&P”—Stokesie, Queenie, and Lengel—help us understand why Sammy quits his job so seemingly abruptly? Regarding setting, does the backdrop of “Greasy Lake” offer a kind of commentary on the changes that the night’s events cause the narrator and his friends to go through? Does the movement of time from early afternoon to almost dark in “The Chrysanthemums” make some sort of implicit comment on Elisa’s hopes for an escape from her narrow life?
As we saw Roberts saying in his first chapter, writing an essay of this kind is not particularly easy; the most effective way to do it is to break the task up into small, relatively manageable steps: developing a thesis, formulating an outline for your support for that thesis, writing a rough draft, revising to produce a final draft. These steps are what we’ll take up in class next week—on Monday we’ll brainstorm about various possible theses for different essays, drawing on what we’ve read in Roberts’s chapters 3-8 about specific questions to ask about the contributions each of the elements of fiction can make to a story, and on Wednesday we’ll talk about going from thesis to rough draft, using the sample essays below as examples.
The two sample essays included with this assignment illustrate this approach to analyzing fiction using plot and point of view. Notice two things both of these essays do well: each one starts with a clear statement of the writer’s thesis—the point about the story the writer wants to discuss and how the selected element helps to make that point; and each one demonstrates the validity of that thesis with well-organized and detailed evidence drawn from the story. These essays also demonstrate how to quote correctly from the story and how to document those quotations at the end of the work, which Roberts covers in more detail in his first chapter.
In addition to our discussion of this assignment in class, if at any point you have further questions about your particular paper, feel free to make an appointment with me to talk about them one on one.