English 320:  The Short Story

Preparing for the Final Examination:  General Instructions

Please note: 

•  If you print off this prep sheet for use off-line, remember that anything that shows up as underlined is not being singled out for special emphasis, but represents a link that you can follow-up only by going back online and clicking on it.]

• There are two prep sheets:  the general prep sheet (which you are reading at this moment) and the detailed prep sheet (which contains the topic options for your in- and out-of-class essays).  You should be sure to make use of both!

The Final Exam will cover all of the reading assignments (except for those specified as recommended only) since the Mid-Term Exam.  These reading assignments include stories, discussions of critical concepts by the editors of our text, and treatments of these concepts in our online glossary of critical concepts.  Also covered on the Final are the critical concepts covered up to the Mid-Term (in the chapter introduction and conclusions and in our online glossary of critical concepts).

Page references below are to our text, Kennedy & Gioia's An Introduction to Literature (8th Ed.)  When you print out a copy of this prep sheet, remember that anything underlined here is a link, which you have to click on while you're on-line, in order to access the document to which it is linked.

There are two parts to the Final Exam.   Each is described in more detail later on in this prep sheet.

In each answer, whether shorter or longer, you will be expected to show familiarity with certain critical concepts and, of course, with the work under discussion.

Here are the works you need to be familiar with for the Mid-Term Exam.  

1. Amy Tan. A Pair of Tickets" (pp. 136-151).  [There is a WA hat might give you some ideas.]

2. Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (pp. 158-161).  [There is a WA that might give you some ideas.]

3. William Faulkner, "Barn Burning" (pp. 162-175).  [There is a SG, as well as a WA that might give you some ideas.]

4. Guy de Maupassant, "The Necklace" (pp. 177-183)

5. Ha Jin, "Saboteur" (pp. 184-192)

6. Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" (pp. 197-215).  [There is a WA hat might give you some ideas.]

7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited" (pp. 216-232)

8. Luke 15:11-32:  "The Parable of the Prodigal Son" (pp. 232-233)

9. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Harrison Bergeron" (pp. 233-238).  [There is a SG, as well as a WA that might give you some ideas.]

10. John Steinbeck, "Chrysanthemums" (pp. 245-253)  [There is a sample student paper on this story on pp. 275-77 of our text.]

11. Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" (pp. 254-262).  [There is a WA hat might give you some ideas.]

12. Octavio Paz, "My Life with the Wave" (pp. 262-266)

13. Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (pp. 267-272).  [There is a SG as well as a WA on this one.]

14. Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People" (pp. 390-404)

15. Raymond Carver, "Cathedral" (pp. 448-458)

16. Chinua Achebe, "Dead Men's Path" (pp. 494-497)

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In addition, you will be responsible for any three of the additional stories (your choice):

1. Ralph Lombreglia, "Jungle Video" (pp. 281-294).  (Recommended:  Lombreglia on creating this story [pp. 294-296].)

2.  Frank O'Connor, "First Confession" (pp. 719-725).  [There is a SG.]

3. Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings" (pp. 510-513)

4. Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" (pp. 405-416)

5. Raymond Carver, "A Small, Good Thing" (pp. 458-475)

6. Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (pp. 693-705)

Once you have made some provisional decisions about which stories you want to focus on for the first three sections, you will want to see whether the editors' questions following these stories might offer useful inroads for your purposes.  The same goes for the various study guides on the web that were linked to from the Course Schedule (Parts I and II).

The critical concepts you should try to show familiarity with on this exam are the ones following the next horizontal line.  In the list below I have given links to some rather extensive discussions of some of these notions in the Glossary of Critical Concepts on our course web site.  But you should first review the introductory and concluding pointers the editors of our text provide in their sections on 

• "Fable, Parable, and Tales" (pp. 4, 4-5, 6, 7-8); 

• "Plot" (pp. 11-12 & 20-21); 

• "The Short Story" (pp. 12-13);

•  "Point of View" (pp. 22-27 & 75);

• "Character" (pp. 77-80 & 107-08); 

• "Setting" (pp. 109-111 & 152-53);

• "Tone and Style" (pp. 154-58 & 193-94);

• "Irony" (pp. 175-76);

• "Theme" (pp. 195-97 & 241); and

• "Symbol" (pp. 243-45 & 275).

Then review the stories listed above in the light of their discussions.  (Don't forget the advice given above, in the box preceding the list of stories!)

When you have decided on the questions want to focus on preparing for your longer answers, you can then go to the more detailed treatments of the relevant concepts in our web glossary.  (Don't forget, though, that a very important resource to exploit should be the discussion that develops on these stories on our class Message Board.)

• the distinction between chronicle and plot

• elements of plot

  • dramatic situation

    • conflict

    • protagonist

    • antagonist

  • dramatic question

• structural features

  • exposition

  • precipitating incident

  • complication / rising action

    • suspense

    • foreshadowing

    • crisis

    • climax

  • falling action:  conclusion / resolution / dénouement

• similarities and between traditional fables and tales on the one hand and a "short story" (in the modern sense) on the other.  Among the notions that we might need to have recourse to in articulating the distinguishing features of these genres are:

  • primacy of focus

    • on incident ==> tales

    • on moral or prudential wisdom ==>  fables, parables. 

      • Features tending to distinguish fables from parables include:

        • plot:  fanciful vs. plausibly realistic.  

          • Often the plot of a short stories is often organized around an epiphany.

          •  the situation examined in a short story confronts us with an initiation story.

        • main characaters:  anthropomorphized animals or natural beings/forces vs. human beings

        • conveyance of moral:  explicit statement vs. suggestive implication

          • kinds of parables, in turn

            • Illustrative example

            • Allegorical translation

    • on character, and especially on complexity of character (short story)

      • details of psychological and social repression

        • [How is psychological repression distinct from social (e.g., political) repression?  What elements do the two have in common?  How can they reinforce each other?]

        • the unconscious (as a noun concept)

  • narrative means

    • allegory vs. realism:  which predominates in the short story?

    • summary vs. scene:  which has come to predominate in the short story?

• the possibilities at stake in an author's choice of point of view in narrating a story.  What are the different options, what "games" do they make possible, and what readers have to be alert to in tuning into these games and carrying out the reader's role in the playing of them?  (In particular, when should we be on the lookout for innocent or unreliable narrators, or for an unreliable central consciousness?)

  • participant narrator (also known as first-person narrator)

    • narrator a minor character

      • marginal participant in the action

      • an observer of the action on the scene (sharing the time and place with the action) but not participating in the action

    • narrator a major character or central participant (even protagonist)

  • non-participant narrator.  Here there is a continuous range of possibilities, within which the following categories may claim our attention.  

    • omniscient narrator  (Note that interior monologue and stream of consciousness are special possibilities of "omniscience" that in practice, especially in short stories, will almost always be limited to selective omniscient windows).

      • broadly omniscient narrator (seeing into the thoughts and feelings of any and all of the characters)

      • selectively omniscient narrator (whose telling is also sometimes referred to as "limited omniscient" narration)

        • narrator affording an inside view of one major character

        • narrator affording direct access to the inner experience of a single minor character

    • objective narrator (abstaining from giving direct information on the interior life of any characters, and presenting only externally observable details of their behavior)

• concepts important for articulating choices authors make regarding characterization

  • stock characters

  • motivation

  • flat vs. round characterization

  • static vs. dynamic characterization

    • classifying plots in terms of this distinction

  • allusion

  • anti-hero

• ways in which setting (cultural-historical it may be, or physical) can enter into the situations that engage our interest, by

  • helping to form character, or

  • setting up a predicament under which character can display itself, or

  • functioning symbolically to illuminate action or character.

• ways in which, behind the scenes, authors contrive to shape readers' attitudes towards things, events, actions, characters within the story.  These indirect indicators of "authorial tone" may include (depending on the story in question) the following.

  • selection of characters, events, and situations that make up the story itself

  • selection of details (sponsoring this or that feeling towards something described)

  • plot irony (irony of outcome)

  Note that these three indices in the list above apply to all stories -- including stories that come to us through participant narrators.  The next three are crucial in stories that come to us through non-participant narrators.  

  • editorial intrusions (of "pretended authorial" non-participant narrators)

  • narrative voice of non-participant narrators, whether omniscient or objective.  We must always keep in mind that non-participant, like participant narrators (characters), are fictional constructions, and not direct expressions of the author.  This goes for pretended impersonal narrators, whether omniscient or objective, as well as for "pretended authorial" narrators.  Still, we should not blind ourselves to the fact that authors, behind the scenes, use even pretended impersonal narrators to shape our attitudes towards the facts of the story these describe.  We need to be aware of  

    • diction

      • simplicity v. various kinds of richness?

      • words and phrases that carry an evaluative tinge?

      • exactness of word choice (as brought to mind by contrast with our imagination of some rough "synonym")?

      • verbal irony?

    • style -- e.g., 

      • tendencies in sentence length and complexity (cf. Hemingway or Carver v. Faulkner, in the analysis given on pp. 156-58)

      • habits with respect to literality v. figurative language (similes, metaphors, metonymies).

  • Is the story being told from an ironic point of view?   Is there a distance, in attitude, between the narrative voice and (for example) the protagonist towards this or that issue or event?

  Note that narrative voice is often even more obvious in the case of participant narrators.  Here, though, we confront the additional issue of evaluating the personality and reliability of the narrator himself or herself.  

  • For instance, if we're dealing with a reliable first-person narrator, there may be an ironic distance between the protagonist proper (the "I" who is at the center of the story's action) and more mature self who is telling the story about his or her (now outgrown) self.  Yet often this narrator is at pains to put in the foreground his/her feelings during the unfolding of the events that are the heart of the story, and refuses to be specific about what he/she has since learned, by reflection, on these events -- leaving us, as readers, with the task of figuring this out on the basis of facts that are given but whose full significance the younger self was unable to appreciate at the time.

  • A quite different possibility is that there is dramatic irony at work at the expense of the (participant) narrator.  Here the story is not being told from an ironic point of view.  Rather, the author, behind the scenes, is presenting us with a narrator whose interpretations (in his telling) we are to recognize as mistaken?  

    • We should be especially alert to this possibility when we realize we have to do with a dramatic monologue.  But it can also happen when the reader is not being assigned a fictional identity within a particularized fictional situation.

    • Note that the distance between a participant narrator and the implied author can be quite different in different stories.  Both the speaker of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and the speaker of "Gimpel the Fool" are put forward ironically by their respective authors.  But the dramatic irony is quite different in the two cases.

• You should have a general idea what the typical indicators are that something in a story is operating symbolically.  [Of course, an element in a story may operate realistically as well as symbolically.]  See the hints in the last non-italicized paragraph on p. 245 and the hints on p. 274.

  • This will outfit you as well to be tactful in not forcing symbolic readings upon elements that are probably not operating symbolically, but instead operating merely realistically.  (That a detail is operating strictly realistically does not necessarily mean it has no function beyond serving as a marker of "verisimilitude":  realistic details can be richly indicative of further meaning without this meaning being symbolic.  [Again, though:  depending on the indications the author has built into the context, a given element can function both symbolically and realistically.]

  • Be alert for the symbolic act.

  • Try to get clear on the difference between the ways symbolic stories and allegories work.

• Of course, everything we've been talking about sooner or latter is governed by the story's theme -- its overall reason for being, some complex of general ideas or insights that the story as a whole reveals, i.e., that it instantiates as a particular case.  But you want to be sure you're actively alert, in reviewing the stories on our list, to the first 4 hints given on pp. 197-98, and that you check them against the tests outlined in the last 2 points on p. 198.

Your job is not to define these terms in the abstract ("fill in the blank"), or to match them with definitions.  Rather you should be able to apply them appropriately.

• You will encounter questions that incorporate one or more of these terms.  Obviously you cannot frame a suitable answer to the question without understanding the concepts involved, and recognizing what features of the particular story you're discussing fall under it.

• In general, too, you will not be asked just to identify some feature of the story that falls under a particular concept, but to explain something of the significance of this feature in the overall working of the story.  This shows your awareness of the point of being acquainted with the concept.

  • For example:  while you should indeed be able to identify the climactic moment of each story [a what question], and to explain what about it makes it function that way, you should be ready to say something about so what?  You might spell out some particular implication at stake in this dramatically emphasized moment that supports (say how) the larger theme, or reason for being, of the story as a whole.

  • For any story you would want to be able to describe story's point of view.  But you would also want to be able to say something specific about how the author's choice of that point of view contributes something important to the overall effect or theme of the story.  (You might do this be imagining some apparently close equivalent point of view and then figuring out what would happen if were chosen instead.)

  • For any character -- but certainly for any character crucial in the main action of the plot -- we want to reflect on whether that character changes in some important way in the course of the action.  But we want to use what we come to notice, under this curiosity, to take us further into the heart of the story:  how are these facts about the character important in shaping the particular kind of experience the author evidently wants to invite us to "try on," or in raising the issues the story evidently is designed to invite us to think about?

You will write 1 short essay (at 25 points apiece) and 10 short answers (at 5 points apiece).

You can find a good deal of detailed information on what to expect on the Final Exam by clicking   here.

On our exams and in our essays, students are acting under Kansas State University's provisions regarding Academic Honesty and Plagiarism.  An important point in these provisions is that instructors may spell out what degree of collaboration is permitted among students on specific assignments.  For this exam, you are positively encouraged to use the class Message Board to help each other in thinking through the facts and issues that are relevant to any of the questions on this prep sheet.

Good luck!  I hope to see an active discussion on our Message Board!