English 320:  The Short Story

Feedback on Option 2 of the Out-of-Class Essay for Spring 2002 Mid-Term Exam

An Example, using Singer's "Gimpel the Fool"

The task in Option 2 was the following: 

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 the character of the protagonist creates action, in the story you choose to focus on, and explain how what this causes us to notice is important to the story's overall reason for being.

Suppose we were to undertake this with I. B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool."

The first thing we have to do in approaching such a task is to analyze the task into its logical elements and get clear about how these elements logically relate to each other.  Unless we do the first, we have no way of knowing whether we have completed the task.  Unless we do the second, we have no way to devise a coherent strategy for organizing the various parts of our essay.  

Doing this two-fold analysis of the topic, in other words, provides you with a checklist for critically reading your latest draft, with a view to discovering opportunities for making it more systematic and complete, and (as a consequence) more deeply insightful.

Before reading further, be sure that you've worked your way through the general feedback memo on this topic!  If you've done this, then you are in a position to understand the point of the following outline.

Here are some of the key episodes in the story’s plot.

• G marries Elka.

• G allows Elka to convince him he was "seeing things." (1^st instance of E’s adultery).

• G convinces himself that he was mistaken (re: 2^nd instance) so as to retract the testimony to the rabbi.

• G pisses in the dough.

• G buries the bread.

• G divides his fortune up among the children.

• G leaves Frampol.

• G becomes an itinerant story-teller.

• G holds long conversations with Elka.

• G forms the opinions he does about what the real status of "lies" are on earth.

We might also consider that the appearances of the Evil One and of Elka after her death (while the dough he has urinated in is baking and in the conversations he holds with her in his life as an itinerant beggar after he leaves Frampol) are productions of Gimpel’s own imagination. But if that is what they are, then they, too, count as (unconscious) actions on the part of Gimpel (since he doesn’t experience them as such).  (And if they are unconscious, then so is his concealing them from himself.  These concealments, that is, also count as actions.)

Since what we mean by a plot is something more than a series of happenings, or even of actions, but something with a particular kind of structure, you haven’t characterized the plot until you

1. have taken these all into account; and
2. have discerned their role in some overall structure — i.e., explained what their contribution is as part of the rising action, or as the climax, or as part of the denouement.

For each of these, you have to have something to say about what, in Gimpel’s character, produces them. Note that it won’t be sufficient here to rest content with the simple view that he is just "simple-minded" or "gullible" or "naïve."  These latter two (not the first) are true, but they aren’t sufficient to account for the facts of the story.  To do this, you need to take into account the following facts.

(1) Gimpel isn’t simply fooled!

(a) In most cases, he knows that people are trying to impose on him. He refrains from retaliating and goes along with the imposition. And in some cases he actively works to convince himself that what he suspects (or knows) is false is true (or vice versa).

(b) The cases in which he hallucinates (if we suppose this possibility) are far from simple, since we have to account not only for why these appearances appear but why he (unconsciously) conceals from himself his responsibility for producing them.

(2) To get at his deeper traits — the ones we are prompted to by our curiosity about the complications just mentioned — we have to inquire into his motivation.

(a) Here we have to notice his own explanations to himself, when he conveys these.

(b) We also have to infer what must be going on in addition to, or instead of, what he tells us about his motives.

In the case of his encounters with the Evil One and with Elka after her death

Motives, though, aren’t themselves traits, but clues to traits. So we have to formulate some conception of what sort of assumptions and values must or may lie behind his disposition to be moved in such ways in such circumstances.

(3) You need to try to come up with some synthesis of the various traits you come up with into some overall conception of Gimpel’s character. This involves two different kinds of "move" on your part:

You need to show how the various traits you’ve come up with logically relate to each other. (Which are expressions of others; which are complementary to which others, and how?)

What are we to think about Gimpel?  How are we to feel about him?  How do we think Singer expects we would feel about him?

Why?

In answering this last question, you will find yourself entering into the thematic precincts of the story.  You will generating materials for answering the question of why Singer might have been moved to craft the story "Gimpel the Fool." 

What might the final draft of an essay that undertakes these tasks look like?  When everyone has turned in revisions on the out-of-class essay on the midterm exam, I'll post a couple.  Until then:  use these feedback memos as guides to coming up with the most systematic and insightful final draft you can craft upon the topic and story you chose to write upon.