Reading a Story for Its Elements

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Reading a Story for Its Elements
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• Literature Craft Voice
• Chapter 1

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• Your job as a writer of fiction is not to
  present an ideal world but to try to present the
  world that you see and hear around you.
• John Updike

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Craft

• A writer creates a story out of material he or
  she has observed in the world and from incidents
  or feelings or moods in his or her own life.
• But the result will not hold up well if the
  writer lacks a firm grasp of craft. Craft is
  conscious artistry.

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Quotations on Writing

• A writer is a person for whom writing is more
  difficult than it is for other people." Thomas
  Mann
• "There are three rules for writing the novel.
  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W.
  Somerset Maugham
• "There is no great writing, only great
  rewriting." Justice Louis Brandeis
• "I have made this letter longer, because I have
  not had the time to make it shorter." Blaise
  Pascal
• All writing is rewriting. Ernest Hemingway

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Craft

• As a noun, craft refers to the elements that
  comprise a story.
• As a verb, craft refers to the process of making
  or fashioning a story out of those elements.

Authors work hard to develop their craft.
Writing seldom comes easily even to professional
writers.
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Elements of Fiction

• Craft involves the authors use of the following
  major elements of fiction
• Plot the artful arrangement of incidents in a
  story.
• Character the depiction of human beings (and
  non-humans) within a story.
• Setting the time and place of the story.
• Point of View the perspective from which the
  story is told.

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Elements of Fiction

• Tone the implied attitude of the author toward
  the subject and characters of a work.
• Style the characteristic way in which a writer
  uses language, tone, and other literary devices
  and elements.
• Symbol the events and objects in a story that
  transcend literal interpretation.
• Theme the central ideas of the literary work,
  its underlying meanings.

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Types of Short Fiction

• Parables stories that teach lessons through an
  implied moral, usually of a religious or
  spiritual nature. Jesus taught in parables.
• Fables brief stories that explicitly state
  their moral, and frequently feature animals as
  characters to satirize failings of human nature
  or character. Aesops fables have endured for
  over 2500 years.
• Tales narrate strange or fabulous happenings in
  a direct and swift manner, without detailed
  characterization and usually without intent to
  instruct.

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Types of Short Fiction

• Modern Short Story The modern short story
  developed in the nineteenth century,
• presented detailed representations of everyday
  life,
• included more elaborate and dramatic scenes with
  generally more dialogue,
• and was more concerned with revelation of
  character.
• Poe, Hawthorne, and Chekhov are important early
  practitioners.

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A P

• In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing
  suits.

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Discussion Questions

• How does A P function as a historical
  document? Consider how the narrator performs his
  job as cashier, the dress code, the items for
  sale, the A P itself, and the Cold War
  backdrop.
• How is Sammys predicament very human? Is he a
  convincing nineteen-year old?

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Sammy
Consider

• Is Sammys action heroic?
• Whether heroic or not, is his action offensive or
  belittling to women?

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Discussion Questions

• Is Sammy full of teenage angst? Does he have an
  attitude?
• Is he a rebel without a cause?
• When Sammy quits in protest over their needless
  humiliation, does he act from mostly pure motives
  or does he want to impress the girls?
• Is it this sincere sympathy that leads Sammy to
  quit in spontaneous protest?

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Discussion Questions

• Is Sammy sexist? Certainly, he sees the girls as
  sex objects, and he does dehumanize them, even
  after he says he feels sorry for them.
• Do the girls need Sammys defense? Would they be
  able to handle such a situation on their own, if
  men would let them?
• Is Sammy really a rebel or is he just embracing
  the values of a male-dominated culture when he
  defends the girls?
• Would Sammy have quit if Lengel had reprimanded
  three males for shopping shirtless and shoeless?

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Story of an Hour

• InspirationKate Chopins father died in a
  work-related accident when she was very young.
  The event may have inspired The Story of an
  Hour.
• Point of View
• Chopin presents the story in the third person,
  but the narrative voice looks most often, but not
  exclusively, into the consciousness of Louise
  Mallard.

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Questions to Consider

• Consider how this perspective influences the
  theme of the story.
• By looking into primarily Mrs. Mallards
  thoughts, does the story become a kind of
  feminist text?
• One that concerns itself with the opportunities
  available for women in the late nineteenth
  century? (Remember, this story was written some
  twenty-five years before women were allowed to
  vote.)

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The Mallards Marriage

• If one were to ask Mr. Mallard if he and his wife
  were happily married, how do you think each would
  reply?
• Mr. Mallard and the couples friends and family
  believe the marriage to be happy. But Mrs.
  Mallard is decidedly unhappy. The day before the
  story takes place she had thought with a shudder
  that life may be long.
• What accounts for the discrepancy between what
  Mrs. Mallard feels and what everyone else
  perceives about the marriage?

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The Mallards Marriage

• Mr. Mallard is a decent man. Mrs. Mallard thinks
  of his kind, tender hands and his face that
  had never looked save with love upon her, and
  wonders, however briefly, about her monstrous
  joy.
• She had a comfortable home and he cared for her.
  The marriage had all the trappings of what the
  culture would consider a happy marriage.
• What is lacking is the opportunity for Mrs.
  Mallards self-fulfillment.

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Louise Mallards Epiphany

• As with many stories, The Story of an Hour
  builds to the protagonists epiphany, or moment
  of sudden realization.
• Read closely the passages leading to Mrs.
  Mallards epiphany, which is inspired by the new
  spring life outside her window. Note how the
  sounds, sights, and scents of spring arouse Mrs.
  Mallards senses and how her bosom rose and fell
  tumultuously.
• She then realizes that with her husbands death
  her life is her own and that she will have a
  long procession of years to come that would
  belong to her absolutely, and that she was now
  Free! Body and soul free! She felt the very
  elixir of life through that open window.
• Her joy was short-lived, however. When her
  presumably dead husband arrives home, Louise dies
  from a heart attack.

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Discussion Questions

• The first sentence says that she has heart
  trouble? Is this trouble only physical?
• The final sentence reads, When the doctors came
  they said she had died of heart disease of joy
  that kills. What is ironic about this
  conclusion?

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An Ounce of Cure

• In An Ounce of Cure, Alice Munro presents a
  defining moment in her narrators life.

When I say I was expecting extravagant results,
I do not mean that I was expecting this.
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Point of View

• It is clear to the reader from the consistent use
  of past tense, the level of vocabulary, and the
  mention of key events (first dance, college) that
  the narrator is looking back to her somewhat
  distant past.

As a result, the narrator can tell her story with
playfulness, self-deprecation, detachment, and
even fondness.
Although the incident caused her genuine pain at
the time, she has long since come to terms with
it.
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Tone

• Consider how the narrator reports the devastating
  aftermath of her evening at the Berrymans.
• She was ostracized but uses humorous metaphors to
  downplay her pain. She reports rumors playfully
  rather than bitterly.
• Her final sentence reveals that she has even had
  the last laugh over Martin Collingwood.
• Throughout the story, the narrator keeps the tone
  light and playful, never letting the painful
  parts of the experience dominate.

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The Narrator

• The narrator seems to be a somewhat typical
  teenage girl who, after being spurned by her
  boyfriend, takes drastic actions to dramatize her
  crisis. She enjoys her self-inflicted misery,
  the self pity, and the attention it brings her
  from friends like Joyce.
• The breakup makes the narrator feel older, more
  mature, as if she has now experienced a depth of
  suffering that links her with tragic film or
  stage heroines. Before her greatest scene, she
  describes the uncluttered space in the Berryman
  home to be like a stage.
• Consider her melodramatic actions leading up to
  her drunkenness she plays a sad record, sits in
  the dark, notices the street light, the partially
  drawn curtains, and gives up her soul for dead.
  
• Do you sympathize and empathize with the
  narrator? Are you reminded of a moment of folly
  in your own life?

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Significance of the Events

• The story is significant to the narrator for
  several reasons
• The episode is one of those revealing and
  embarrassing moments in teenage life when we are
  forced to confront how unsophisticated and how
  self-absorbed we are, or, put another way, when
  reality intrudes upon our delusions of self.
• On another level, the incident may have brought
  the narrator closer to her mother, who, in a
  crowded household, might not have always been as
  watchful over her daughter as she might have
  consider the narrators confession about the
  aspirin, which was a mistake.

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For Further Consideration

• 1. Short stories often focus on a defining moment
  in a characters life. Explain what the
  protagonists of A P, The Story of an Hour,
  and An Ounce of Cure come to realize about
  themselves and their cultures?
• 2. How does setting function in each of these
  stories to reveal character?
• 3. Rewrite a portion of one of the stories from a
  different point of view. For A P, you may
  write from Sammys perspective twenty years after
  the event for The Story of an Hour,
  Josephines perspective, and for Ounce of Cure,
  the narrators perspective only days after her
  experience.