English 320:  The Short Story

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

[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.]

The Final Exam is worth 100 points.  It consists of 3 obligatory sections.  Section A is a take-home essay 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, C, and D will be administered as an in-class closed-book exam.  Altogether, you will write 2 short essays (worth 25 points apiece) and a series of briefer answers (worth 50 points).  Each question you write upon in Sections A, B, C, and D must be upon a different story.  There will also be a brief optional extra-credit section, Section D, which you will write (if you choose to do so) at the end of the in-class exam session.

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

Students in both sections may attend either of the two final exam sessions scheduled for Baker's sections of the course.  (Both will take place in our regularly-scheduled classroom -- Eisenhower 012.)  The dates and times are:

• Monday, 12 May, 4:10 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
• Thursday, 15 May, 11:50 a.m. - 1:40 p.m.

Sections B, C, and D 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, write upon two (2).  (All will appear on the exam.  You can thus prepare your two answers in advance.  But you must write them without consulting notes.)  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.  Also:  you can't write on the same topic for more than one story.

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.

1. Explain how one of the following does or does not invite illuminating analysis as a coming-of-age story:
   • Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews" 
   • LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
   • Kincaid's "Girl"
   • O'Connor's "Good Country People"
   • Borges's "The Library of Babel"
2. Explain the dimension of religious allegory in one of the following stories:
   • Barth's "Night-Sea Journey"
   • Kafka's "A Hunger Artist"
   • Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"
   • O'Connor's "Revelation"
   • Borges's "The Library of Babel"
   • Kafka's "Before the Law"
3. Explain how the protagonist of one of the following stories functions as an anti-hero.  Explain how these facts shape our attitude towards the protagonist, and say something about how these evaluations bear upon some important aspect of what you take to be the overall theme of the story.
   • Barth's "Night-Sea Journey"
   • Dische's "The Man Who Read a Book"
   • Kafka's "A Hunger Artist"
   • O'Connor's "Good Country People"
   • Gogol's "The Overcoat"
   • Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths"
4. A number of stories we've read seem to be at least part concerned with raising issues (social and political, or religious, as the case may be) that the audience might be so uncomfortable as to turn a deaf ear before the writer gets a hearing.  As a result, in the manner of Nathan's parable to David, they contrive to present a situation that will not immediately be recognized as referring to the ultimate business at hand.  Show how this indirect strategy of indirection works for one of the following stories for which you think it is genuinely the case.  Be sure to explain what the issues are that you think are potentially uncomfortable for the audience, and why.  And be sure to explain how the story raises them in a form that is initially unthreatening to the audience.  (Can you point to how the story makes the move equivalent to the one in the line "Thou art the man" in Nathan's parable?)
   • Wolff's "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs"
   • Barth's "Night-Sea Journey"
   • Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God"
   • Jackson's "The Lottery"
   • LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
   • Kafka's "A Hunger Artist"
   • O'Connor's "Revelation"

Section C.  (20 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.

Since your job here is to be able to form the questions for yourself, it will suffice to remind you simple of what I gave you on the prep sheet for the Mid-Term, leaving you to adapt them to the stories we've read since then..  Here then are the examples you've already seen 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.  As before, on 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 "How the Snake Got Poison" communicate the view that the Creator is not omniscient? 
   • 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?  
   • What would be the analogous question we would pose whenever we have an allegorical parable?  (What point is Jesus making in the Parable of the Good Seed?  Is it identical to -- or different from -- the point he is making in the Parable of the Sower?  [By the way, does the object "seed" stand for the same thing in each parable?])
3. 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"?
4. How does "The Prophecy" work as a story of initiation?
   • What other stories would it make sense to expect a question of this form upon?
5. Is Appachana's characterization of Amrita (the narrator's roommate) in "The Prophecy" flat or round?  (OR:  pick Patram, the college guard.)  Explain you answer, and then say something about how this choice makes sense given what the story is ultimately concerned with.
6. 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?
7. 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?  
8. 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?
9. 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?
10. 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?
11. 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?
12. "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?
13. 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?
14. 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?
15. What offer does the village elder present to Michael Obi in "Dead Men's Path"?  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.
16. 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?]
17. 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?
18. Explain how the setting (natural and social) in Achebe's "Dead Men's Path" relates to the main action of the story.  Conclude by pointing out how the behavior of the fate of the school garden suggests 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 "Dead Men's Path"?
19. What are some features of London's "To Build a Fire" 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?)

Section D will present you with a series of questions to be answered very briefly, demonstrating that you've read the story.  There will be 5, each worth 1 point.

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