English 320:  The Short Story

Detailed Prep Sheet for 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 100 points.  It will be an in-class closed-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 exam.  (You should also consult the General Prep Sheet for Exam 1.)

You will write short responses to 10 questions.  Each question will be worth 10 points.  You shouldn't need more than a couple of sentences for each item you take up.  You are not eligible to write upon

• any story in this section twice or
• any story you already wrote upon in the in-class essay or the out-of-class essay you've already written.

Here are some examples of the kinds of questions you might expect to encounter in the exam.  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 the exam 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 "Everyday Use" communicate the idea that Dee is a self-centered person?  
   • Here's an instance of a question that gives you some proposal about some key trait of one of the story's characters and asks you to notice what details of the story might be relevant to it.
2. How does "Everyday Use communicate the idea that Dee has a shallow idea of what it is to "appreciate your family heritage"? 
   • 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?
4. 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?
5. How does "Everyday Use" 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 Maggie (in "Everyday Use") flat or round?  how about static or dynamic?  (OR:  pick Dee, or the mother.)  Explain you answer, and then say something about how this choice makes sense given what the story is ultimately concerned with.
7. 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.
8. What is some important element of foreshadowing in the plot of "Everyday Use"?  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?
9. What is some instance of foreshadowing in Boyle's "Greasy Lake"?  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?  [We're not covering this story on this exam, but the question is an instance of a type we should be prepared to frame, when appropriate.]
    • 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. At a certain point in "Everyday Use," Maggie resigns the quilts in favor of Dee:  "'She can have them, Mma,' she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. 'I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts'."  What are we to make of the mother's response to this?
    • 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 Boyle's "Greasy Lake" 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?  (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 Ellison's "A Party Down at the Square" 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?)
22. [Worth 2 questions:]  What are some features of (say) Boccaccio's "The Pot of Basil" that distinguish it from a modern short story like (say) de Maupassant's “The Necklace”?
    • There are 5 other pieces of short fiction on the list of stories you're responsible for on this exam that could be substituted for Boccaccio's here.  And, of course, any of the 13 modern short stories we've read so far could be cited in place of "The Necklace."  To be prepared for this type of question you'd want to be familiar with all the stories, and with the key features our editors have highlighted as characteristic of the genre we call "short story" in the modern sense of the term. 
23. How would you assess the quality and degree of insight of the narrator of Ellison's "A Party Down at the Square" into the story he tells?  Be sure to explain your judgments with reference to relevant specifics.
    • For how many other stories on our list would this sort of question be appropriate?  
      • A useful thing for you to be doing as you are rereading the stories in preparation for the exam is to be trying to arrange the various participant narrators you encounter into a continuum running from "least reliable" to "most reliable."  For the ones that are in one way or another not reliable, try to articulate what exactly are the ways in which they are unreliable.  (For example:  what exactly are the insights into important things that what they convey enables us to arrive at that they themselves have evidently not penetrated to?  Why are these matter that they've not grasped important, for appreciating the theme of the story, or for understanding "the character's character"?)
    • Are there any stories conveyed via a non-participant narrator that we could profitably adapt this question to, by substituting the concept of "central consciousness" for that of "narrator"?
24. What are some of the thematically relevant ways in which Michael Obi and the village priest contrast with each other?
    • You should recognize this as a question about a foil relationship.  Where else, in stories you've not written upon so far, would such a question be on the table?
25. Expect a question in which you are given a passage from one of our stories and asked to (a) describe the speaker's [or thinker's] tone, and (b) comment on the significance of what you say for our deeper understanding of the speaker's character.

    Remember to consult the General Prep Sheet Exam 1.