English 320:  The Short Story

Detailed Prep Sheet for the In-Class Portion of Exam 1

[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.]

Exam 1 is worth 150 points.  It consists of 3 obligatory sections.  Section A is a take-home essay (worth 50 points) that you will bring to class with you for the exam session and attach to the rest of the exam, which you will take in-class.  Sections B and C will be administered as an in-class close-book exam.  In this in-class portion of the exam, you will write 2 short essays (worth 25 points apiece) and a series of briefer answers (all together worth 50 points).  Each question you write upon in Sections A, B, and C must be upon a different story.

The following information should help you prepare thoroughly for the Mid-Term.  (You should also consult the General Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term and the directions for the Out-of-Class Essay for Exam 1.)

Sections B and C will be written in-class.  You will not be able to consult the textbook or any notes.

Section B.   (50 points) From the questions below (on the exam I'll eliminate 2), write upon two (2).  Each answer should consist of at least one solidly developed, well-organized paragraph.  (Shoot for at least 200 words.)  Each is worth 25 points.  In this Section (B), do not write on any story that you write upon in Parts A or C of the exam.

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'd be well-advised to prepare answers to four of these questions, since I will eliminate two of the following (but no more than two) from the actual exam.

1. What are some facts of "The Story of an Hour" that make clear that the protagonist did indeed love her husband?  (Be sure to consider  the events before she goes off to be by herself as well as at what happens after she is alone.)  How is this important in directing the audience's reflection to the institution of marriage rather than to "men" as the subject of the story's theme?  What does the story invite us to think about that subject?  Explain.
2. What are several of the important differences between the mentality and outlook of the narrator and the protagonist of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"?  For each that you specify, you'll want to indicate how the story conveys it.  Why are these differences important within the story as a whole?  (You'll want to commit yourself to some view of the effect the story is designed to have on the reader, or some understanding of the story's overall theme.)
3. What are the leading traits of the narrator of Walker's story "Everyday Use"?  How are these important in both the generation of, and the resolution of, the central conflict?  OR:  Explain how the foil relationship between the two sisters in Walker's "Everyday Use" contributes to the overall theme of the story.
4. What are the features of Miss Brill (in Mansfield's story) that solicit our admiration, in addition to our sympathy?  OR:  This story is structured around two epiphantic moments on the part of the protagonist:  one exalting, one disillusioning.  Briefly summarize these and explain how they affect our feelings when we undergo the story's dénouement.
5. How might "Why I Live at the P.O." be regarded as a story of emancipation?  What factors, on reflection, tend to undercut this idea?  
6. Has Poe drawn the character of the protagonist of "The Tell-Tale Heart" as a dynamic, or as a static, character?  Explain your answer, and show how these facts relate to the gap between the audience's and the protagonist's understanding of what is going on.
7. What are some features of the narrator of "Look on the Bright Side" that invite being seen as weaknesses of character?  What are some features of his personality that strike us as engaging, even admirable?
8. What are some of the ways Gimpel (in "Gimpel the Fool") is a fool?  What are some important ways in which he is not?  Conclude by addressing one of these questions:  
   1. What are we to make of his remark that "the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies."  Is this gibberish, or wisdom?  (Explain.)
   2. What are we to make of his claim, at the end, that "No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world."  Is this foolish, or insightful?  How so?
9. Explain what we are to make of Andre Dubus's comment on the protagonist of "A Father's Story" when he says that "I never said that what Luke Ripley did is good.  But it's important to experience it -- I think the character's good, but he's wrong."
10. Summarize the role the car plays in the relationship between the brothers Lyman and Henry in "The Red Convertible."  End by explaining what you see as the meaning of what Lyman does with it at the end.
11. Spell out in some detail what the narrator of "The Secret Sharer" learns from his encounter with the man he repeatedly refers to as "my double."

Section C.  (50 points) You will write short responses to 5 additional questions.  Each question will be worth 10 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 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 "Miss Brill" communicate the idea that the protagonist is a generous spirit? 
   • 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. 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?
3. How does the story Freud concocts of the rowdy in the lecture hall function as an allegory for explaining the relations among conscious experience, repression, the subconscious, neurotic symptom, and the work of successful psychoanalytical therapy?
   • What is some other work we've read that makes important use of allegory as a way of suggesting meaning?
4. Discuss how the characterization (flat or round, static or dynamic) of the Camel or the Lion support what you take to be the theme of "The Camel and His Friends"?
5. How does Erdrich's "The Red Convertible" work as a story of initiation?
   • What other stories would it make sense to expect a question of this form upon?
6. Is Erdrich's characterization of Henry (in "The Red Convertible") flat or round?  (OR:  pick Susy, or Bonita.)  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 Erdrich's "The Red Convertible"?  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 best qualifies as the precipitating incident in the plot of Erdrich's "The Red Convertible"?  Explain how what it sets in motion is crucial in the overall plot of the story as a whole.
9. 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?  
10. 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?
11. 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 Mansfield's "Miss Brill," 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?
12. 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?
13. 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?
14. "A Rose for Emily" 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?
15. 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?
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 story does the narrator's daughter tell him, in "A Father's Story"?  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.]  Note that the occasion for such a decision, depending on the circumstances, might present an opportunity, or a temptation, or a trial -- quite different kinds of situations.
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 the husband important to the overall effect of Chopin's story "The Story of an Hour"?
    • What is the recipe that generated this question?  Can we follow that recipe to good effect with some other stories on our list?
20. Explain how the setting (natural and social) in Erdrich's "The Red Convertible" relates to the main action of the story.  Conclude by pointing out how the behavior of the spring flood contributes to 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 conclusion of Erdrich's story?  (Cf. the fur piece in "Miss Brill."  Why is the P.O. a better choice for Welty to have fallen upon than, say, a Conoco station, or an antique shop?)
21. What are some features of Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" that retain their interest for us enough to motivate us someday to reread it, and that hold our interest during rereading?  Explain. 
    • Obviously, we undertake this question only if we think there are some features that work this way!  (But there are lots of different sorts of features that can work this way.  Can you think of how this works in some of the stories we've read so far?)

    Remember to consult the General Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term and the directions for the Out-of-Class Essay for Exam 1.