English 320:  The Short Story

Preparing for the Final Examination:  Details

[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.]

Before you study this detailed prep sheet, be sure to consider carefully the General prep sheet for the Final Exam.

Section A.   

This is an out-of-class essay worth 25 points.  You should shoot for at least a page (standard 1-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman type).

As for the criteria I will be using in evaluating your answers to the questions in Section A, you can find a succinct statement here and a more detailed explanation here.  You should also exploit the General Study Guide.  

Section A, Option One.

Several of the stories we've read exploit an important symbol or symbolic act.  Unpack the symbolic meanings of some central symbol in one of the following stories, and explain how it connects with the story's overall theme.  (Of course, this means you'll have to commit yourself to a particular view of what the theme of the story is.)

1. Amy Tan. A Pair of Tickets" 

2. Ha Jin, "Saboteur" 

3. Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" 

4. Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" 

5. Octavio Paz, "My Life with the Wave" 

6. Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" 

7. Chinua Achebe, "Dead Men's Path" 

8. Ralph Lombreglia, "Jungle Video" 

9. Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" 

10. Raymond Carver, "A Small, Good Thing" 

11. Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People" 

12. Raymond Carver, "Cathedral" 

Section A, Option Two.

Section B, Option 4.  A number of the stories we've read turn upon several important ironies.  Explain how this is so for one of the following stories.  Explain how these ironies relate to each other, and spell out how this contributes to the story's overall theme.  (Be sure to correctly classify the sort or sorts of irony with which you deal.)

1. Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" 

2. Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" 

3. Ha Jin, "Saboteur" 

4. Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" 

5. Guy de Maupassant, "The Necklace" 

6. Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings"

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

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

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

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

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

12. Frank O'Connor, "First Confession"

Section B.  (25 points).  This will be an in-class short essay (of at least 300 words).  Choose one of the following topics.  (Be sure not to write on the story you wrote upon in your out-of-class essay.  And then be sure not to write on this story in Section C!)  

Section B, Option 1.  Using the scheme explained in our Glossary of Critical Terms, classify the plot of one of the following stories in terms of the characterization of the protagonist.  (Along the way you might ask whether or not the story you are focusing on is an initiation story.)  Then explain how the story exploits plot-type it embodies in the service of its particular thematic ends.

1. Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" 

2. William Faulkner, "Barn Burning"  

3. Ha Jin, "Saboteur"

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited" 

5. Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"  

6. Octavio Paz, "My Life with the Wave"  

7. John Steinbeck, "Chrysanthemums"  

8. Ralph Lombreglia, "Jungle Video" 

9.  Frank O'Connor, "First Confession" 

10. Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" 

11. Raymond Carver, "A Small, Good Thing" 

12. Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" 

Section B, Option 2.  In their parting shot on the subject of character and characterization, our editors are at pains to get novice readers to consider that, in short stories, character may be more fundamental than plot.  "The action of a story," they point out, usually grows out of the personality of its protagonist and the situation he or she faces.  As critic Phyllis Bottome observed, 'If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot.'"  Demonstrate some of the important ways in which character creates action, in one of the following stories, and explain how what this causes us to notice is important to the story's overall reason for being.

1. Amy Tan. A Pair of Tickets" 

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited" 

3. Ernest Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" 

4. William Faulkner, "Barn Burning" 

5. Guy de Maupassant, "The Necklace" 

6.  Frank O'Connor, "First Confession" 

7. Chinua Achebe, "Dead Men's Path" 

8. Ralph Lombreglia, "Jungle Video" 

9.  Frank O'Connor, "First Confession" 

10. Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" 

11. Raymond Carver, "A Small, Good Thing" 

12. Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" 

You have seen both of these topic options before.  Naturally I will expect you to have analyzed the tasks into their constituent elements.  If you are unsure of what this entails, you should review the feedback memos for the out-of-class essay on the mid-term exam.  On our main site (online.ksu.edu), these are found via the second link on the page that appears after you click on the CLASS MODULES button.  (The link is labeled "Rewriting the mid-term out-of-class essay."  This time you needn't look at the "Instructions" document, but only the feedback document for the topic you're choosing.)  On our back-up site, you can also find the feedback document for Option 1 and the feedback document for Option 2.

Section C.  (50 points) You will write short responses to 10 additional questions.  Each question will be worth 5 points.  You shouldn't need more than a couple of sentences for each item you take up.  In Section C, you are not eligible to write upon

• any story in this section twice or

• any story you already wrote upon in Section A or B.

Here are some examples of the kinds of questions you might expect to encounter in Section C.  (You will note that, except for the last few listed, these are the same sorts of questions you met with on the Mid-Term.)  You should use them as models for fashioning corresponding questions about other stories.  (Some of the questions provided here as examples only may actually show up on the exam..)  One the exam, the questions will be divided into groups from which you will be allowed to pick one to write upon.  (You can expect, then, that you won't be addressing the same critical concept in all of your answers.)  The purpose of this section is to enable you 

• to show your awareness of how a variety of critical concepts bring us to frame relevant curiosities.  

• to show you know how to ground a claim in relevant evidence

• to show you know how to follow up an observation with a successful inquiry into its significance

• to show that you have practiced doing these things with the stories in our reading assignments

Typical questions.

1. How does "Godfather Death" communicate the view that Divine Providence has established an order of nature in which the world's population will always be stable? 
   • Here's an instance of a question that gives you some proposal about some aspect of a story's theme and asks you to notice what details of the story might be relevant to it.

2. How does the Parable of the Prodigal son communicate the view that God's mercy is infinite? 

   • Here's an instance of a question that gives you some proposal about some aspect of a story's theme and asks you to notice what details of the story might be relevant to it.

3. What point does Freud use the story of the horse of Schilda to make about the demands of civilization and the psychological health of the individual?  How does he use the story to do this?  

   • What would be the analogous question we would pose whenever we have an allegorical parable?  (What point is Jesus making in the Parable of Prodigal Son?  How would the point of this story be radically different if we were to take it as a mini-short story in the realistic mode instead of as an allegorical tale?  What would the father represent in the story considered as realistic?  What does the father represent in Jesus' allegory?)

4. Discuss how the characterization (flat or round, static or dynamic) of  the grandmother support what you take to be the theme of "First Confession"?

5. How does "A & P" work as a story of initiation?

   • What other stories would it make sense to expect a question of this form upon?

6. Is Updike's characterization of Queenie in "A & P" flat or round?  Explain you answer, and then say something about how this choice makes sense given what the story is ultimately concerned with.

7. What is some important element of foreshadowing in the plot of Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"?  What does it foreshadow, and how?  When we reread the story, how do we come to see this as important in the portrayal of the protagonist's character?  

   • What other stories would it make sense to expect a question of this form upon?

8. What is some instance of foreshadowing in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"?  The narrator knows where this is leading, but why doesn't he disclose this to the reader at this moment?

   • Why did it make sense to follow up the answer to the first question in this case by a different sort of question than appears as a follow up in the previous item?  Do we nevertheless in this case eventually also come round to issues about the protagonist's motivation?  

9. What are we to understand as the climax of "The Story of an Hour"?  How does it qualify as the climax?  How does it also qualify as an epiphany? 

   • See how a question of this type would be appropriate for any of the short stories we have taken up?

10. What is the denouement of "The Story of an Hour"?  Point out some way in which it contributes to the overall theme of the story.  

    • Are there any short stories we have read so far for which this question would lead to a dead end?  Here's a variation:

      • What constitutes the dénouement of London's "To Build a Fire," and what of importance would be lost if it were eliminated?

        • See how the sort of "thought experiment" exploited in the follow-up here amounts to a special way of exploiting the general concept of foil?

11. What constitutes the epiphantic moment of Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"?  What thematically important issues does it eventually set us to unpacking?  

    • Which of our stories so far offer payoff for this line of curiosity?

12. What happens to the narrator of Poe's "A Tell-Tale Heart" as he approaches the telling of climactic moment of the story he is telling us?  What motivates this?  

    • Note that this question turns upon the distinction between what is told (described) by a dramatized narrator and what is exhibited (shown) by that narrator in the present.  Dramatized narrators are a special possibility when we have a participant narrator.  Hence this question would be useful to pose for any story in which we have a dramatized narrator.  For which of the stories we've read so far is this the case?

13. "Sonny's Blues" is an example of a story that begins "in medias res."  What does this mean?  What are some important events of the story that the narrator loops back to tell us?  How are they important to understanding the story's climactic episode?

    • Are there any other stories we've read so far that invite us to pursue this agenda of curiosity?

14. How does the title of Katherine Anne Porter's story connect with the story's epiphantic moment?  What issues does this raise for us to consider?

    • Does this question invite being adapted to some other stories covered on this exam?

15. How does the title of Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"  involve a double reference?  Say something about the implications of one of these references within the story as a whole.

16. What sort of "everyday use" do we figure Dee would put the quilts to if she were to be given them?  What does this tell us about the values that are most important to her?

    • Here we find ourselves getting curious about some kind of action we could predict for a character beyond the action actually portrayed in the story.  Can you remember what, in our class discussion, prompted us to pursue this kind of thread in the cases of Dee and Maggie?  (What could we come up with if we were to ask the corresponding question about Maggie?)  Would this work with any other stories we've read so far?

17. What temptation does the Evil One present to Gimpel?  What are we to make of his response to it?

    • Are some other stories we have met with structured around a crucial decision on the part of the protagonist?  In cases where this is so, are we led to be curious about the motivations behind whatever decision results?   Do we find the motivation to be simple, or are multiple factors at work?  Does the understanding we reach of the character's motivation affect our sense of that character's character?  [Note the double sense of this term "character" in our vocabulary.] 

18. What would be lost if Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O."  were to be narrated by a limited omniscient narrator with an inside view on the experience of Sister?  (For the purposes of this section of the exam you need to specify only one, even though in engaging a story outside the exam we wouldn't stop with that!.)  Why is this important?

    • What has to be the case for a question of this form to be relevant in connection with a particular story?  Here's a variation that, in such situations, might also be useful:   what of thematic importance in Welty's story would be lost if it were to be recast as "Why Sis Lives at the P.O.," and told by Stella-Rondo?  [Incidentally:  see how these questions are special instances of exploiting foil relationships?]

19. How is the characterization of Bobinôt important to the overall effect of Chopin's story "Storm"?

    • Here we have a question about the function(s) of a subordinate character?  Can we follow that recipe to good effect with some other stories on our list?

20. Explain how the setting in Chopin's "The Storm" relates to the main action of the story.  Conclude by pointing out how the behavior of the storm affects our sense of what Chopin is suggesting on the level of the story's theme.

    • Note that setting frequently plays a causal and/or conditional role in a story's plot (and that, when this is so, it can be in several distinct respects).  But we have to be careful not to force a symbolic role upon elements of the setting.  What are the clues that some feature of setting is playing a symbolic role, when it is, as it is in "The Storm"?

21. What is some important irony at work in Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." and how does it contribute to the story's overall theme?

22. How does the narrator's style and/or tone affect our attitude towards the protagonist of Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"?

23. What is some important symbolic act or object in Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"  (To establish that it is a symbol, you'll need to commit yourself to a view of what it is symbolic of.)

    Return to the General prep sheet for the Final Exam.