AP English Literature

Lesson 1.1 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · CHR 1.A

What details reveal about a character

A story rarely tells you what a person is like. It shows a room, a gesture, a sentence spoken aloud, and leaves the judgment to you.

So argue from the detail, not the adjective. “Trapped” is your word; the dusty curtain a character leans against is the text's. An asserted trait earns nothing; a quoted detail starts an argument.

Lesson 1.2 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · SET 2.A, 2.B

Setting and what it does

Students lose the setting point by stopping at the weather. “The setting is gloomy” is a paraphrase; “the setting functions to…” is the start of an argument.

Setting is everything the characters move through (place, hour, weather, the social world), and every detail of it was chosen. Ask what each one makes possible, impossible, or inevitable.

Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · STR 3.A, 3.B

Plot: how events are ordered

Plot is not the list of events. Plot is the order a writer puts them in, and the order is where the meaning lives.

Two questions do the work: what happened, and when did the reader find out? Where the sequences differ, something was withheld, and a withholding is arguable.

Lesson 1.4 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · NAR 4.A, 4.B

The narrator and point of view

Someone is always telling the story, and that someone is part of it. A narrator is not a window; a narrator is a decision about what you are allowed to see.

Two questions start the analysis: who is speaking, and what does that position let them know? The answers set the limits of everything else you can argue.

Lesson 1.5 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · FIG 5.A, 5.B

Literal and figurative: reading one detail two ways

A detail can carry meaning without being a symbol, and a symbol is not a code to crack. The dependable method has two steps, and the order matters.

First establish what the thing literally is and does. Only then argue what it does for the story. Skip step one and you are asserting a meaning the text cannot confirm.

Lesson 1.6 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · LAN 7.A

The basics of literary argument: claim, evidence, commentary

Everything in this unit converges here. An analytic paragraph has three parts, and a reader can tell within two sentences whether you know which part you are in.

A claim is an interpretation someone could argue with. Evidence is the text's own words, kept short. Commentary explains how those words support the claim, and it is the part the rubric actually pays for.

Unit 1 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 1 review: detail, setting, order, and voice

Ten exam-style items built on two stories this unit did not teach, the opening of Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and the first paragraph of Crane's “The Open Boat”, so that the unit's four foundations have to work on prose you are meeting cold.

Multiple choice

1. Passage A. About the text: Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” first published in the San Francisco Examiner, 1890, and collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). The opening of the story; the paragraph continues past the excerpt.

   A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.

   In context, the details of the cross-timber, the sleepers, and the loose boards primarily serve to

   establish the engineering soundness of the bridge on which the men are standing build the gallows out of the ordinary parts of a railway, so that the place is not where the execution happens but the equipment with which it is carried out suggest that the bridge is in poor repair and may give way under the weight of the men on it locate the scene precisely enough that a reader could find the bridge on a map of northern Alabama

   The timber is called “stout” and the boards do hold the men, so soundness is genuinely in the passage, but that is the information the detail carries, not the work it performs. Ask what the parts of the bridge are being put to, and the answer is a hanging.

   Correct. Read the nouns: sleepers, the metals of the railway, loose boards, a stout cross-timber. Every one belongs to a bridge and every one has been handed a job in an execution: the timber holds the rope, the boards hold the feet. Setting here is not the room the scene is played in; it is the apparatus, which is why the paragraph reads less like a crime than like a procedure.

   Nothing suggests disrepair. “Loose boards” describes planks laid down rather than fastened, and the sentence's own verb says they “supplied a footing”: they are doing their job. A word that sounds ominous out of context is not yet evidence.

   Northern Alabama is named, and the war it implies matters, but a location is not a function. A setting question asks what the described place does to the people in it; an answer that stops at where they are has answered a different question.

2. Passage A, above: Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 1890.

   A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama … The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord.

   The paragraph gives the reader the man's situation before any of the events that produced it. This arrangement chiefly functions to

   signal that the rest of the story will proceed in strict chronological order from this moment onward establish the crime the man has committed so that the reader can judge whether his punishment is fair open at the end of a sequence the reader has not been shown, so that the first thing the story raises is the one thing it withholds: how a man comes to be standing here indicate that the narrator reached the scene too late to witness what actually happened

   The opening makes no such promise, and the missing cause has to be supplied from somewhere other than forward motion. Treating an opening as a pledge about sequence assumes that the order of events and the order of telling are the same thing, which is precisely the distinction this item tests.

   No crime appears. The passage supplies a rope, a cord and a Federal uniform and leaves you to infer a war and a charge; an answer that arrives with a verdict has read past the words on the page into the story it expected.

   Correct. The order of telling is doing the work. In time, the man was seized, tried and marched to this bridge; the story begins after all of it, with a result standing in place of its own causes. That is why the opening produces a question rather than a scene, and why withholding, not revealing, is the move to name when you write about how a story is arranged.

   The narration misses nothing that is happening on the bridge: it measures the drop, the cord, the slack and the boards. A narrator who reports this closely is plainly present. What he declines to give is the past, not the present.

3. Passage A, above: Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 1890.

   The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck.

   The passage characterizes the man on the bridge chiefly through

   the things fastened to his body (a cord at the wrists, a rope at the neck, boards under his feet), since the paragraph gives him no name, no speech, and no reported thought a summary of his history that explains how he came to be under guard his physical resemblance to the soldiers who are about to hang him the emotions he displays as he looks down into the water below

   Correct. Count what he is given: hands, wrists, a neck, a footing, and something attached to each. Every interior fact is withheld and no label is offered, so the only evidence of a person here is the tackle holding him in place. Character built from detail rather than from a narrator's adjective is the whole of CHR 1.A, and in this paragraph the detail belongs to other people's equipment.

   No history is given. The single biographical guess in the paragraph attaches to the sergeant, “in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff”, and even that is a guess. The absence of the condemned man's story is a design decision, not an oversight.

   The soldiers are identified by uniform and rank, the man by his bonds; no likeness is drawn between them. The passage does put them on the same boards, which is a shared footing rather than a shared appearance.

   He looks down into the swift water and the narration stops there, no expression, no trembling, no dread is reported. Reading feeling into a body described only from outside is how an unsupported character claim begins.

4. Passage A, above: Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 1890.

   … two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.

   The phrase “may have been a deputy sheriff” most clearly indicates that the narration

   has entered the sergeant's memory and is reporting what he recalls of his civilian work is being spoken by one of the two private soldiers standing on the boards is unsure of the physical details it has just reported about the bridge and the rope stands outside every man in the scene: exact about what a body can be seen to be, and openly guessing at anything that cannot be seen

   “May have been” is the opposite of access. A narration inside the sergeant's head would know his trade and say so; this one offers a probability about a stranger, which is what an observer does when a face suggests a former occupation.

   Nothing marks the voice as a participant's: there is no “I,” no place in the line, no stake in what is about to happen. The soldiers are described from outside exactly as the condemned man is, and a man serving under the sergeant would hardly need to guess at his civilian trade.

   Precision is what the physical reporting has: twenty feet, a stout cross-timber, slack falling to the level of the knees. The hedge lands only on a biography, and noticing which kind of fact a narrator hedges is how you find the edge of a point of view.

   Correct. Set the two halves of the paragraph side by side. Distances, knots and timbers are given flatly, as measurements; the instant the sentence reaches a man's life before the war it retreats to “may have been.” This narration can see bodies and cannot see histories, and that boundary, what a point of view can and cannot show, is the thing to name when a question asks about narration.

5. Passage A, above: Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 1890.

   A student claims that the opening presents the hanging as a piece of routine work rather than as a horror. Which detail, taken up next, would most advance that line of reasoning?

   “looking down into the swift water twenty feet below” “A rope closely encircled his neck.” “Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners” “in northern Alabama”

   The drop is the passage's most vivid image, which is why students reach for it first, but a man staring down at water twenty feet below fits a horror reading as comfortably as a routine one. Evidence that supports a claim and its opposite equally advances neither.

   The rope is the fact the claim has to survive, not the fact that proves it. Quoting the most violent detail in the paragraph to argue that the scene feels ordinary asks the reader to do the work your commentary should be doing.

   Correct. The sentence is written in the vocabulary of a railway inspection (sleepers, the metals of the railway, a footing “supplied”), and it hands the same plank to the condemned man and to his executioners without distinguishing between them. Choose the quotation whose wording, not merely whose content, carries the claim; here the diction is the argument, and one sentence of commentary pointing at “supplied” finishes the move.

   A place-name locates the scene and does nothing else. A line of reasoning advances when each new piece of evidence narrows the case, and a state narrows nothing.

6. Passage B. About the text: Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” first published in Scribner's Magazine, 1897, and collected in The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898). The first paragraph of the story; four men are adrift in a dinghy after a shipwreck.

   None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

   The point of view established in the first two sentences is best described as one that

   holds the men together as a group and limits itself to what their eyes take in, so that the paragraph's first fact is something none of them can see belongs to a single survivor recalling the day afterward in the first person moves freely among the men, reporting what each of them privately fears singles out one man in the boat whose perceptions govern everything that follows

   Correct. “None of them” and “their eyes” bind the men into one unit, and the next clause fastens that unit to the waves. The story opens by naming a color nobody in it has looked at, which tells you at once how narrow the available world has become: a point of view is a limit before it is a voice.

   There is no “I” and no retrospect; the verbs report what is happening rather than what was remembered. A first-person survivor would also be in no position to say “none of them” with such confidence about the other three.

   No mind is entered. The paragraph offers exactly one piece of shared knowledge, that all of the men know the colors of the sea, and not a single private thought, which is a long way from moving among four interiors.

   No man is singled out: not one is named, described, or given a separate line of sight. Assuming a story must have a center of consciousness is reasonable in general and wrong here, and that is what makes this opening unusual enough to be worth writing about.

7. Passage B, above: Crane, “The Open Boat,” 1897.

   The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

   The account of the horizon in the final sentence contributes most to the setting by

   marking the moment at which land comes into view for the first time fixing the hour of the day by the height of the sun above the water showing that the sea is beginning to flatten as the storm moves off setting the edge of the world in motion (narrowing, widening, dipping, rising), so that the men's surroundings will not hold still long enough to be measured

   No land appears. What rises at the edge is water, waves “thrust up in points”, and mistaking them for a shore is exactly the hope the sentence exists to deny.

   No sun is mentioned anywhere in the paragraph, and the sky is the one thing nobody has looked at. Time of day is precisely the information this opening refuses to supply.

   Every verb in the sentence is motion, and the waves making the horizon jagged are still standing up. Reading a calm into a clause built from four verbs of movement reverses what the setting is doing.

   Correct. A horizon is supposed to be the one fixed thing you can steer by, and Crane gives this one four verbs in a single clause. The place these men are in is defined by instability, which is why so much can be made of a small boat: the function of this setting is to remove every reference point except the next wave.

8. Passage B, above: Crane, “The Open Boat,” 1897.

   These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white … its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

   The comparisons in “the hue of slate” and “thrust up in points like rocks” work together chiefly to

   indicate that the boat has drifted dangerously close to a rocky coastline lend the water the color and the edges of stone, so that the only surface holding the boat up is described in the terms of the things that would break it praise the beauty of the sea by comparing it with valuable materials suggest that the men are too exhausted to describe accurately what they are seeing

   “Seemed” is the word that saves you here: the waves only seem thrust up like rocks, and no coast is anywhere in the paragraph. Turning a comparison into a fact of the plot is the commonest figurative-language error on this exam, and this sentence is built to catch it.

   Correct. Take the literal sense first (gray water, a jagged edge), and then ask what the figure imports. Slate is roofing; rocks sink boats. Both comparisons reach for stone and press it into a description of water, so the sea reads as something hard at the exact moment the men need it to hold them up. Another reader might weigh the two images differently; what makes this reading defensible is that both of them go to the same material.

   Slate is cheap gray stone and rocks are a hazard; neither is valuable, and nothing in the sentence admires anything. Assuming that imagery must be doing something appreciative is a habit worth breaking early.

   The description is precise rather than exhausted: a hue, a contrast with foaming white, an edge called jagged and in points. The men's situation is desperate, but the narration's eye is not tired at all.

9. Passage B, above: Crane, “The Open Boat,” 1897.

   Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them … and all of the men knew the colors of the sea.

   The paragraph characterizes the men in the boat chiefly by

   the contrasting temperaments each of them shows as the waves rise the orders the captain gives and the way the others receive them one shared attention: nameless, faceless men fixed level on the water, who between them have learned only what the sea looks like their confidence that the boat will carry them safely to shore

   No temperament is described and no man is separated from the rest. The paragraph's pronouns are “them,” “their,” “the men,” and a character question has to be answered with the distinctions a text actually makes.

   Nobody gives an order and nobody is named as being in charge. Supplying a hierarchy the paragraph has not mentioned, because boats usually have one, is how a character claim ends up unsupported.

   Correct. What these men are given is a direction of gaze, “Their eyes glanced level”, and a single piece of expertise: “all of the men knew the colors of the sea.” They are characterized by a limit, and it is a limit the sea has taught them. A group can be a character, and what a text withholds (names, faces, thoughts) characterizes as surely as what it supplies.

   Nothing in the paragraph is hopeful. The men watch waves “that swept toward them,” and the sentence about the horizon ends on points like rocks; confidence would have to be carried in from outside the text.

10. Passage B, above: Crane, “The Open Boat,” 1897.

    A student writes: “Crane uses imagery of slate and rocks to show that the sea is dangerous.” Which revision best turns that observation into commentary?

    “Because the waves are given a stone's color and a stone's edges, the surface the men depend on is described as the thing likeliest to destroy them, so the danger is a condition of the water itself rather than an accident waiting somewhere later in the story.” “Crane uses simile and color imagery in the opening paragraph of ‘The Open Boat.’” “The sea is described with words such as ‘slate,’ ‘jagged,’ ‘points,’ and ‘rocks.’” “The imagery is powerful and vivid, and it shows what a gifted writer Crane was.”

    Correct. It keeps the original's evidence, adds the logic the original skipped, stone is the one thing water is not, and then states what that costs the reader: the sea is not dangerous because something happens in it, it is dangerous in the way it has to be looked at. That final clause is the “so what” sentence Row B keeps asking for.

    This names the devices more accurately than the original, and naming is where most drafts stop. A reader who can see the similes already knows they are there; the sentence still has not said what they accomplish, which is why it stalls in the lower half of Row B.

    Listing the words is evidence without commentary. Quotation is necessary and not sufficient: the point is earned by the sentence that explains how those particular words support the claim being made.

    Praise is not analysis. “Powerful and vivid” could be written about any paragraph in the anthology without reading this one, and a claim that survives without the text cannot be supported by it.

Lesson 2.1 · Unit 2 · Poetry I · NAR 4.A, 4.C

The speaker: voice, situation, and audience

A poem's “I” is a made thing. Even when the voice sounds like confession, what reaches you is a position the poet built, with a situation behind it and a listener in front of it.

So settle three questions before you interpret anything: who is speaking, what circumstance they are speaking from, and who is being spoken to. Change any one and the same words mean something else.

Lesson 2.2 · Unit 2 · Poetry I · CHR 1.A, 1.E

Character in a poem

A poem has no room for a biography, so it builds a person out of how they talk. Twenty lines are enough if the lines are listened to closely.

The richest evidence is what a speaker gives away without meaning to. Read for the hesitations, the repetitions, and the register: the level of language a person reaches for under pressure.

Lesson 2.3 · Unit 2 · Poetry I · SET 2.A, 2.B

Setting in a poem

A lyric builds its world in a handful of words (a season, an hour, a weather), and then leans on it. Place is never scenery; it is the condition the speaker thinks under.

The move that earns points is the one you learned in fiction: go past the mood word to the function. And watch for the element that does not match the rest. It is usually the poem.

Lesson 2.4 · Unit 2 · Poetry I · STR 3.C

Structure: lines, stanzas, and the turn

Form is not packaging. A stanza break is a pause the poet imposes on you, a rhyme is a promise about what is coming, and a turn is the moment an argument changes direction.

An English sonnet gives you three four-line units and a closing pair, which means three chances to make the same move and one place to say what it adds up to. Read the units as steps in a case.

Lesson 2.5 · Unit 2 · Poetry I · FIG 5.B, 5.D

Word choice, imagery, and detail

Every word in a poem beat out a synonym to get there. The useful question is never “what does this word mean?” but “what would the obvious alternative have lost?”

Imagery is the same question at the level of the senses. A poem that works in texture and taste is asking you to perceive something, not to picture it, and the difference is worth an argument.

Lesson 2.6 · Unit 2 · Poetry I · FIG 6.A, 6.B, 6.C, 6.D

Comparison: simile, metaphor, personification, allusion

Naming a comparison is the cheapest sentence in a literary essay, and on its own it earns nothing. The work begins one step later.

Name both terms, the subject and the thing it is compared to, then say what the comparison lets a reader see that a direct statement would not. That second sentence is the one Row B pays for.

Unit 2 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 2 review: the speaker, the turn, and the comparison

Ten exam-style items on two complete sonnets this unit did not teach, Christina Rossetti's “Remember” and Wordsworth's “The World Is Too Much with Us”, with line numbers printed every fifth line so that you can cite them the way a reader will expect.

Multiple choice

1. Passage A. About the text: Christina Rossetti, “Remember,” first published in Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862. Complete, 14 lines; modern spelling, printed flush left, with a line number at every fifth line.

   Remember me when I am gone away,
   Gone far away into the silent land;
   When you can no more hold me by the hand,
   Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
   5Remember me when no more day by day
   You tell me of our future that you planned:
   Only remember me; you understand
   It will be late to counsel then or pray.
   Yet if you should forget me for a while
   10And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
   For if the darkness and corruption leave
   A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
   Better by far you should forget and smile
   Than that you should remember and be sad.

   Lines 1–8 are best understood as spoken by

   a mourner addressing someone who has already died a speaker who expects to die soon, giving instructions to the living person she is still standing beside a lover setting out on a long journey and asking to be written to a narrator describing a parting between two other people

   The situation runs the other way. “Remember me when I am gone away” puts the departure in the speaker's own future and the remembering in the listener's, so the one who will be dead is the one doing the talking. Elegies usually work as this option describes, which is exactly why the reversal is worth catching on a first read.

   Correct. Everything asked for is set in a time the speaker will not be present for, “when I am gone away,” “when you can no more hold me by the hand”, while the actions given to her now are still within reach: she can “half turn to go yet turning stay.” The poem's pressure comes from that overlap, a woman close enough to be held who is already arranging the time after her.

   “Gone far away into the silent land” and “It will be late to counsel then or pray” rule a journey out: a traveller can be advised and prayed with, and a traveller's country is not silent. Taking a euphemism literally turns a deathbed into an itinerary.

   The poem is addressed, not reported: “Remember me,” “you tell me,” “you understand.” A second person that insistent puts the speaker inside the scene rather than outside it, which is the first thing to settle in any speaker question.

2. Passage A, above: Rossetti, “Remember,” 1862, lines 1–2.

   Remember me when I am gone away,
   Gone far away into the silent land;

   In context, the phrase “the silent land” (line 2) primarily serves to

   locate the poem in a particular country the speaker is about to travel to suggest that the listener will stop speaking to the speaker after a quarrel name death without naming it, and to define it by the one property the rest of the poem needs: that nothing can be said across it establish that the scene takes place at night, when the countryside has gone quiet

   No country is named, and the phrase is a figure, not a destination. A metaphor that you resolve into a place on a map stops being able to do the work the poem gives it two lines later.

   The silence belongs to the land, not to the listener; he goes on talking in the poem's own account of him, “day by day,” and it is that talk the speaker says will end. Assigning a quality to the wrong figure is the commonest way an otherwise careful reading goes wrong.

   Correct. The word “death” never appears in the sonnet. Of everything a metaphor for death might select (darkness, sleep, rest) Rossetti selects silence, and the octave then builds on it: counsel and prayer will be “late,” the future can no longer be told, so whatever must be settled has to be settled now. A comparison that chooses one property is making an argument, not decorating a subject.

   Nothing marks an hour. The only time-words in the octave are “day by day,” and they describe a habit of conversation rather than a setting. A plausible-sounding detail with no line behind it is still an invention.

3. Passage A, above: Rossetti, “Remember,” 1862, lines 8–10.

   It will be late to counsel then or pray.
   Yet if you should forget me for a while
   10And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

   The shift that occurs at line 9 functions to

   open the sestet by allowing the opposite of what the octave asked for, so that the poem's second half spends itself taking back its own request introduce a second speaker who answers the first move the poem out of the present and into a memory of the past reveal that the listener has already forgotten the speaker

   Correct. The octave says “Remember me” three times; then one conjunction, “Yet,” turns the poem at the place an Italian sonnet turns, the head of line 9. From there the sestet concedes forgetting (“do not grieve”), qualifies its own claim (“if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige”), and finally prefers the smile to the memory. Notice that there is no stanza break to warn you: the argument changes direction while the white space stays the same, which is why a structure claim here has to be built on the rhyme and the syntax.

   One voice runs the whole sonnet; the “you” is addressed constantly and never given a line. A reversal inside an argument is not a change of speaker, and the rhyme carries on without interruption through the turn.

   The tenses go forward, not back. “If you should forget” is conditional, “do not grieve” is an imperative, and the single backward look, “the thoughts that once I had,” sits inside a condition about what may survive. Watch the mood of the verbs before you claim a change of time.

   “If you should forget me for a while” is a supposition the speaker raises herself, not a report of something that has happened. Reading a hypothetical as an event is the fastest way to lose a question about a turn.

4. Passage A, above: Rossetti, “Remember,” 1862, lines 11–12.

   For if the darkness and corruption leave
   A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

   The primary effect of the words “darkness and corruption” (line 11) is to

   accuse the listener of having behaved dishonourably once the speaker is gone begin a religious argument about judgment that the sestet then develops describe the listener's grief as something that has spoiled him let the grave's physical work into a poem that has so far called death only distance and silence, so that the speaker's “if” is measured against what actually happens to a body

   “Corruption” here is decay, not misconduct; the word belongs to the older, bodily sense, and the thing being worked on is the speaker, not the listener. Choosing a modern connotation over the one the sentence supports is precisely the diction error this item is built on.

   “Counsel then or pray” in line 8 is the poem's only religious language, and it names what will be too late rather than opening a doctrine. A religious word is not a religious argument, and the sestet's business is memory.

   The grief in this poem belongs to the listener and is treated with care: “do not grieve.” The darkness and the corruption are in the ground, and attaching them to a living man's feelings reverses who is being described.

   Correct. Through line 10 death has been “gone away,” “the silent land,” the hour when hands can no longer hold; line 11 says what that distance is actually made of. The bluntness is load-bearing, because the speaker is granting that even a “vestige” of her thinking may not survive, and it is that concession, not modesty, that makes the closing preference for forgetting sound like a gift.

5. Passage A, above: Rossetti, “Remember,” 1862, lines 13–14.

   Better by far you should forget and smile
   Than that you should remember and be sad.

   The poem's closing two lines are best understood as

   evidence that the speaker has stopped loving the person she addresses a conventional consolation offered to the reader rather than to the listener a final ranking that sets the listener's happiness above the speaker's own claim on him, made in the plainest words the poem has used proof that the speaker is confident she will not in fact be forgotten

   Nothing is withdrawn but the demand. The sestet gives up a claim, not a person, and the difference between those two things is what the whole second half of the sonnet is about: a speaker who had stopped loving would have no reason to weigh the listener's sadness at all.

   The address never widens. “You should forget,” “you should remember”: the couplet is spoken to one person about what will go on inside him, and its comfort is arranged for his sake rather than a reader's. A sentiment can sound conventional and still be aimed at somebody in particular.

   Correct. The comparison is explicit, “Better by far … Than that”, and what it weighs is not remembering against forgetting but smiling against being sad. Watch the diction drop, too: after “darkness and corruption” and “a vestige of the thoughts that once I had,” the poem ends on “smile” and “sad.” Another reader could hear the couplet as one last bid for sympathy, and that dispute is what makes the generosity worth arguing for rather than asserting.

   The sonnet offers no such assurance; its last six lines are built out of conditions, “if you should forget,” “if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige”, that deliberately leave the outcome open. Reading confidence into a chain of “ifs” supplies a certainty the poem declines.

6. Passage B. About the text: William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” first published in Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807. Complete, 14 lines; text as commonly printed in modern editions, with a line number at every fifth line.

   The world is too much with us; late and soon,
   Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
   Little we see in Nature that is ours;
   We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
   5This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
   The winds that will be howling at all hours,
   And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
   For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
   It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
   10A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
   So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
   Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
   Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
   Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

   In lines 1–4 the speaker's use of “we” and “our” chiefly serves to

   place him inside the failure he is describing, so that the complaint is a confession before it is an accusation address a particular group of contemporaries whom the poem goes on to name indicate that he speaks on behalf of an organized movement show that he and one companion are walking together beside the sea

   Correct. The grammar will not let him stand outside: “we lay waste our powers,” “We have given our hearts away.” That inclusion sets the tone of the octave, since a sonnet that said “you” would be a scolding; and it makes the turn audible, because the first-person singular does not appear until “Great God! I'd rather be,” where one voice finally pulls free of the group it has been indicting.

   No group is ever named, no class, trade, city, or party. The pronoun is left unspecified on purpose, which is what allows it to take in the reader along with the speaker.

   Nothing is proposed or organized. What the sestet asks for is a way of perceiving, “glimpses,” “sight,” to “hear”, and a wish to see differently is not a programme for anyone to join.

   “This Sea” is looked at, not walked beside with company, and the only figure the poem ever stands anywhere is the “I” of line 11, alone on “this pleasant lea.” A plural pronoun is a claim about who is implicated, not a count of the people present.

7. Passage B, above: Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” 1807, lines 5–8.

   5This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
   The winds that will be howling at all hours,
   And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
   For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

   In context, lines 5–7 primarily serve to

   describe a storm that is about to break over the coast explain why the speaker prefers the shore to the city demonstrate that nature is indifferent to human beings give the natural world a body and a will (a sea that bares, winds that howl and are then gathered up like flowers), so that being “out of tune” in line 8 means failing to answer something alive

   The winds are doing the opposite of breaking: they “are up-gathered now,” stilled, and “will be howling at all hours” names their habit rather than tonight's weather. Reading a habitual future as a forecast turns a quiet evening into a storm the poem never has.

   The city is not in the poem. “Getting and spending” names an activity, and the sonnet's charge is against a way of living that could be carried on anywhere, which is why the cure it imagines is a change of sight, not a change of address.

   Indifference is precisely what these lines refuse. The sea is given a bosom and the moon something to bare it to; the winds are given voices and then sleep. Whatever indifference the poem finds runs the other way, and belongs to “us.”

   Correct. Two comparisons do the work in three lines: the sea is personified, and the winds are personified (“howling”) and then handed a simile (“like sleeping flowers”) that makes them small, gathered, and asleep. A seascape becomes a presence with moods, and line 8 draws the conclusion at once: “we are out of tune.” The tuning metaphor needs something to be out of tune with, and these lines are what supply it.

8. Passage B, above: Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” 1807, lines 8–10.

   For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
   It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
   10A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

   The primary effect of placing the sonnet's turn inside line 9 rather than at its beginning is to

   signal that the rhyme scheme is about to close with a rhyming couplet make the verdict on the octave and the outburst answering it share one line, so the change of direction sounds like something breaking rather than something planned show that the speaker has begun to address the sea directly hold the turn back until the final two lines, in the manner of an English sonnet

   The sestet rhymes cdcdcd (be, lea, sea against outworn, forlorn, horn), and the poem never reaches a couplet at all. Reading the rhyme sounds aloud is a five-second check worth making before any claim about form.

   Correct. “It moves us not.” closes the octave's case in four words, and then, with no line to breathe in, “Great God! I'd rather be” arrives in the same line, in the singular, at a pitch nothing before it prepared. An Italian sonnet is expected to turn at line 9; this one turns in the middle of line 9, and the half-line of running-room is what makes the wish sound blurted instead of argued. A reader could reasonably call the outburst theatrical rather than genuine: the placement is the evidence either way.

   The sea stays in the third person from line 5 to line 13, and the only direct address in the poem is the exclamation “Great God!” Turning a cry into an apostrophe to nature mistakes who is being spoken to.

   The final couplet is the English sonnet's hinge, and this poem is Italian: octave abbaabba, sestet cdcdcd, with the turn at line 9 and six lines still to run. Naming the form correctly tells you where to look for the argument to move.

9. Passage B, above: Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” 1807, lines 11–14.

   So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
   Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
   Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
   Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

   The references to Proteus and Triton (lines 13–14) function chiefly to

   display the speaker's classical learning to an educated reader predict that the old gods will return to a world that has forgotten them give the “creed outworn” two figures a reader can actually picture, so that what the speaker wants is not belief in general but a way of seeing in which the sea has somebody in it contrast modern government unfavourably with the politics of ancient Greece

   Display is a real motive in some allusions, but the verbs here argue against it: the speaker wants to “Have sight of” and to “hear,” and a man performing his education would be naming rather than looking. An allusion question asks what the borrowed figure does in this poem, not what it proves about its author.

   The wish is contrary to fact from the start, “I'd rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn”, and a creed the speaker himself calls outworn is not one he expects to come back. Prophecy needs a future the sonnet never offers.

   Correct. An allusion works by importing what a reader already knows, and these two bring exactly one thing: sea-gods doing sea-things, Proteus rising and Triton sounding his horn. Put at the end, they answer the octave's own complaint: the sea that “bares her bosom” in line 5 would, to a pagan's eye, be inhabited rather than merely observed. Notice that the poem asks for perception, not doctrine (“glimpses,” “sight,” “hear”), which is why it ends on two visible figures instead of a belief.

   No government appears anywhere in the poem, ancient or modern. Greece enters as mythology, and the charge in the octave is against how people spend their attention, not how they are governed.

10. Passage B, above: Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” 1807.

    All of the following help the octave present modern life as a kind of loss EXCEPT

    “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” (line 2) “The winds that will be howling at all hours” (line 6) “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” (line 4) “For this, for everything, we are out of tune” (line 8)

    This one does the work. “Lay waste” is the vocabulary of ruined ground, and it is attached to “our powers,” which makes the damage self-inflicted rather than suffered. A true contributor is not the exception.

    Correct: this is the exception. The howling winds belong to the natural world the sonnet is defending, not to the life it is charging; they describe what we have lost the use of, not anything we have done. In an EXCEPT item, three options share one job and the fourth quietly changes subject, so test each option against the question rather than against your sense of the poem as a whole.

    This contributes too, and the key is “boon.” A boon is a gift or a blessing, and calling the exchange “sordid” makes the trade itself the loss: hearts handed over for something cheap.

    And so does this. “Out of tune” is the octave's own summary of the damage, and the metaphor defines the loss as a lost capacity rather than a lost possession, which is what the sestet then tries to buy back with a creed.

Lesson 3.1 · Unit 3 · Longer Fiction or Drama I · CHR 1.A, 1.D

First impressions: how a long work introduces a character

A novel's first page does two things at once. It hands you a few facts, and it trains you to expect certain things. The facts arrive slowly; the expectations arrive immediately.

So read an opening twice, once for what you were told, once for what you were asked to take for granted. And when characters talk, listen to the relationship the exchange builds, not only to the news it carries. Who begins, who repeats, who declines to answer: that pattern is evidence, and it is usually steadier than anything either speaker claims.

Lesson 3.2 · Unit 3 · Longer Fiction or Drama I · CHR 1.B

Character development across a long work

A long work gives a character room to become someone else. The exam does not ask you to notice that a character changed; it asks you to explain what the work gains by changing her.

So stop describing the change as an event. “Jane stands up to her aunt” is plot. The analytic question is why the change is placed here, at this age, in this voice, and whether the person telling you about it has changed too. Ask the same of a character who stays as she was: standing still is also a function.

Lesson 3.3 · Unit 3 · Longer Fiction or Drama I · SET 2.B, 2.C

Setting as a force on character

In a short story the setting can be a mood. In a novel it is a condition: something the characters have lived under long enough to be shaped by it.

So ask a physical question before an atmospheric one. What does this place make difficult? What does it make impossible, or inevitable? A house that has to be built against the wind tells you what the wind does to everything else standing out there, people included.

Lesson 3.4 · Unit 3 · Longer Fiction or Drama I · STR 3.E, 3.F

Conflict and plot structure: name it before you explain it

Plot is not the list of things that happen. It is the arrangement, which event is allowed to change what the characters can do next. Conflict is what does the arranging, and “character versus society” is too blunt a name to build an argument on.

So name a conflict the way a lawyer would: who wants what, from whom, and what happens if they do not get it. Then ask the question the exam pays for: what does this particular conflict let the work show that nothing else could? In a play you have to answer from speech and stage directions alone. No narrator will step in to tell you what anyone is feeling.

Lesson 3.5 · Unit 3 · Longer Fiction or Drama I · NAR 4.B, 4.C

Narrative distance: how close the narrator stands

Third person is not one distance. A narrator can stand at the back of the room and report, or move close enough to use a character's own vocabulary, and Austen changes the distance inside a single sentence.

So stop asking whether a narrator is reliable and start asking how far away she is standing right now, and what the position lets you see. Free indirect style is the instrument: the narration keeps its own grammar but borrows somebody else's words, which means it can agree with a character and grade her in the same breath. The test is simple: would this character say that phrase about herself?

Lesson 3.6 · Unit 3 · Longer Fiction or Drama I · LAN 7.B

From claim to thesis: writing a sentence worth defending

A claim becomes a thesis when a careful reader could disagree with it and still be reading the same book. That is the whole of Row A, and it is the cheapest point on the exam to lose.

You lose it three ways: by handing the prompt back with the nouns rearranged, by summarizing what happens, or by saying something so obviously true that no evidence could bear on it. You earn it by writing one sentence somebody could argue against, and then spending forty minutes making that somebody wrong.

Unit 3 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 3 review: character, setting, and the turn

Ten exam-style items on a novel opening and a scene from a play this unit did not teach, the first page of Great Expectations and the moment in King Lear when a daughter answers a king with a single word, so that the unit's skills have to travel to text you are meeting cold.

Multiple choice

1. Passage A. About the text: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, first published in weekly parts 1860–61; the opening chapter, in a churchyard on the marshes where Pip's parents are buried. Pip, who narrates the novel as a grown man, is about seven years old in the scene. The ellipsis stands for a further stretch of the same sentence, in which the child also makes out his parents' gravestones and the flat marshland beyond them.

   My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; … and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

   “Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves.

   In context, the sequence of things the narrator “found out for certain” primarily serves to

   fix the geography of the marsh country precisely enough that a reader could locate the churchyard on a map explain why Pip's family came to be buried in this particular parish rather than another build the world outward from a grave to the sea and then set a small frightened child at the end of the same list, so that the place defines the boy rather than the boy the place contrast the bleakness of the churchyard with the warmth of the home Pip has left behind

   The sentence does supply geography, but that is the information it carries, not the work it performs; a function question asks what the information is being used for. An answer that stops at the literal content is a paraphrase wearing the costume of an analysis, and it is the single commonest wrong choice on this exam.

   Nothing in the excerpt gives a reason for the burials: only that this bleak place is the churchyard. Supplying a cause the passage withholds turns a description into a plot you have invented.

   Correct. Read the grammar rather than the scenery. One repeated construction, “and that X was Y”, runs from the nettles to the churchyard to the sea and then, without changing shape, arrives at “the small bundle of shivers … was Pip.” The boy is identified by the same sentence and the same syntax that identify the landscape, so setting is not a backdrop here; it is the thing doing the identifying.

   No home appears in the passage, and no warmth. A contrast needs two terms actually on the page, and importing the second one from a later chapter or from a summary you half-remember is how a setting question gets lost.

2. Passage A, above: Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860–61, ch. 1.

   … and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

   The introduction of the novel's protagonist in this clause is most notable for the fact that

   he arrives last in a list of places, described as an object before he is given a name and a verb of his own he is introduced through a speech that reveals his temperament before any description of him he is characterised by the opinions that other people in the scene hold of him he is named in the passage's first sentence and then described at length afterwards

   Correct. The noun phrase does the characterising before the name does: he is “the small bundle of shivers,” a thing made of trembling, and the only verbs attached to him, “growing afraid,” “beginning to cry”, are things happening to him rather than things he does. The name lands at the very end, after four other identifications, which is why a first-time reader meets Pip as the smallest item in his own world.

   Pip does not speak in the excerpt; the only speech belongs to the voice from the graves. A first impression built out of dialogue is a real technique, it is how Pride and Prejudice opens, but it is not what is happening here, and swapping one method for another is the trap.

   Nobody in the passage has an opinion of Pip. He is alone until the last line, and even the man who appears gives him an order rather than an assessment.

   The order is the reverse: he is described for a full clause and named in the final word. Getting the sequence backwards loses the whole point, because the delay of the name is what makes the description land as a condition rather than a portrait.

3. Passage A, above: Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860–61, ch. 1.

   My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. … and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

   The phrase “seems to me to have been gained,” taken together with the naming of the crying child as “Pip” rather than as “me,” indicates that the narration is

   uncertain whether the events it describes ever took place at all supplied by a bystander who watched the child from somewhere else in the churchyard handed over at this point from one narrator to a second who takes up the story a grown man's account of his own childhood, standing far enough back from the boy to describe him in the third person while still claiming the memory as his own

   The hedge is about memory, not about fact. “Seems to me to have been gained” concedes that a first impression is hard to date precisely; it does not doubt the afternoon, which the same sentence calls “memorable.” Read what a modal verb is actually qualifying before you turn it into scepticism.

   The possessive rules it out: “My first most vivid and broad impression.” The memory belongs to the speaker, so the distance here is distance in time, not distance in place: a difference worth keeping straight, because only one of them can be closed by growing up.

   One voice speaks throughout. A narrator who calls his younger self by name has not been replaced; he has stepped back from himself, which is a move within a single narration rather than a change of narrator.

   Correct. Both signals point the same way. “Seems to me” is the adult weighing an old impression, and “was Pip” lets that adult look at the child from outside, as one more object in the churchyard. Distance is a dial, not a switch: the telling is close enough to know exactly how frightened the boy was and far enough to name him as though he were someone else.

4. Passage A, above: Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860–61, ch. 1.

   … and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

   “Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves.

   Placing “Hold your noise!” immediately after the excerpt's long opening sentence functions chiefly to

   confirm that the boy has been crying loudly enough to be heard across the marshes break a sentence that has been accumulating scenery with the first thing in the chapter that acts, so that the conflict enters as an interruption of the child's own account of himself signal that the speaker of the second paragraph will narrate the remainder of the chapter delay the reader's understanding of where the scene is taking place

   It is a fair inference, the crying is in the previous clause and the order is to stop it, but it answers a question about plausibility rather than about effect. Notice how little this reading would change if the interruption came three paragraphs later; a structural answer should stop working the moment you move the line.

   Correct. Everything before it is stative: things were the churchyard, were the sea, was Pip. Then a verb of action arrives from outside the list, “cried,” “started up”, and it lands on the very sentence in which the boy has just finished being catalogued. The turning point of the chapter is not announced; it cuts in, and it takes the child's self-description away from him mid-breath.

   The narration does not change hands. The voice that cries out is quoted by the same narrator who has been speaking, and the paragraph break marks a new event, not a new teller.

   The location has already been established in detail (churchyard, sea, wind, evening) before the voice speaks. A line cannot delay information the passage has just finished giving you.

5. Passage A, above: Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860–61, ch. 1.

   A student must write an analytic essay on the excerpt. Which of the following works best as a thesis?

   “Dickens opens Great Expectations by describing the marshes and the churchyard, and then a frightening man appears and speaks to Pip.” “The setting of the passage is bleak and frightening, and this creates a dark mood for the opening of the novel.” “By naming Pip last in a list of places, Dickens introduces his narrator as one more feature of a landscape that has already frightened him, so that when a voice finally interrupts, the reader takes the threat as something the marsh country produces rather than as a stranger who happens to arrive.” “Dickens uses vivid imagery, repetition, and figurative language in this passage in order to create a memorable opening to his novel.”

   This is summary. It reports the order of events accurately and takes no position, so there is nothing in it a careful reader could argue against, which is the test Row A applies. A sentence that cannot be disagreed with cannot be defended either.

   Closer, because “bleak and frightening” is at least a judgment, but it is a judgment almost any reader would reach in one pass, and “creates a dark mood” names an effect without naming what produces it. Restating the obvious in the vocabulary of mood is the most common way a thesis stalls at zero.

   Correct. It makes a claim about how the passage works (the list, the delayed name), states the consequence of that technique (the boy read as part of the place), and reaches a conclusion a careful reader could contest: someone could argue the convict is exactly a stranger, an intruder from outside the marsh world. That contestability is what makes it defensible, and the essay it opens has a clear line of reasoning to follow: the syntax, then the naming, then the interruption.

   Listing devices is not an interpretation. “Vivid imagery, repetition, and figurative language” could be written about nearly any page of Dickens without reading this one, and a claim that survives without the text cannot be supported by it.

6. Passage B. About the text: William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, scene i (written about 1605–06), in the text of the Globe edition. Lear has announced that he will divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much each of them says she loves him; Goneril and Regan have spoken and been rewarded, and he now turns to Cordelia, his youngest and his favorite. Lines are numbered as printed here, from the beginning of the excerpt. Within fifty lines of its close Lear disowns Cordelia and divides her third between her sisters.

   LEAR. … what can you say to draw
   A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.

   CORDELIA. Nothing, my lord.

   LEAR. Nothing?

   5 CORDELIA. Nothing.

   LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

   CORDELIA. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
   My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
   According to my bond; nor more nor less.

   10 LEAR. How, how, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
   Lest you may mar your fortunes.

   Cordelia's “Nothing, my lord,” and her repetition of the word most clearly introduce her as a character who

   has failed to understand the question her father has put to her expects to win the largest share by appearing modest in front of the court is too frightened of her father to attempt an answer of any length rejects the terms of the question rather than the share it offers, and declines to soften the rejection even when the king opens a second chance for her

   She understands it exactly. Lear asks what she can say to draw a richer third, and “nothing” is a precise answer to that precise question: she has nothing to say, which is not the same as having nothing to feel. A character who answers the question's own verb has not misheard it.

   Strategy of that kind would need some sign of calculation, and the scene gives the opposite: offered a second try and then a warning about her fortunes, she does not adjust. A first impression is built from what a character does when the pressure rises, and hers is to hold still.

   Fear would be silence or retreat. Cordelia answers immediately, answers again when questioned, and then speaks four lines that define her position: “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” is a refusal explained, not a stammer.

   Correct. The repetition is the characterisation. Her first “Nothing” could be nerves; the flat second one, given after Lear has queried it, converts a word into a position. And notice what she refuses: not her father, but a ceremony that asks love to be produced on demand and measured against her sisters'. That distinction is the whole of her in one word, and the tragedy begins because Lear cannot hear it.

7. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i, excerpt lines 1–9.

   … what can you say to draw
   A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. … I love your majesty
   According to my bond; nor more nor less.

   The central conflict established in the excerpt is best described as one between

   a public ceremony that requires love to be performed in words and a daughter who will not put hers into performance a father's wish to lay down his crown and a daughter's ambition to take it from him two sisters competing openly with each other for the same portion of the kingdom a king's authority at home and the claims pressed on him by a foreign suitor

   Correct. Name the conflict from the verbs both sides use. Lear's demand is about speech, “what can you say … Speak”, and Cordelia's answer is about the impossibility of speech: she “cannot heave / My heart into my mouth.” Neither of them disputes that she loves him. What they cannot agree on is whether love said aloud in front of a court is the same thing as love, and the kingdom is being divided on that question.

   Cordelia asks for nothing and takes nothing. The ambition in this play belongs to her sisters, and reading it back onto her flattens the one daughter whose refusal is disinterested: a misreading worth catching early, because the rest of the plot depends on the difference.

   Goneril and Regan are mentioned only as a standard of comparison in Lear's question. They do not speak in the excerpt and are not set against each other in it; a conflict has to be staged on the page before you can call it central.

   No suitor appears here. France and Burgundy are in the scene elsewhere, but importing a pressure the excerpt does not stage is the fastest way to lose a conflict question: answer from the lines you are given.

8. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i, excerpt lines 3–6.

   CORDELIA. Nothing, my lord.

   LEAR. Nothing?

   5 CORDELIA. Nothing.

   LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

   The exchange in lines 3–6 functions chiefly to

   slow the ceremony down so that the assembled court has time to react to what Cordelia has said shrink a scene built on long declarations to a single repeated word at the exact moment the division of the kingdom turns, so that the play's hinge is the shortest thing anyone says in it show Cordelia searching for the words she will use in the longer speech that follows indicate that Lear has not heard his daughter clearly and needs the answer repeated to him

   The court is not shown reacting, and nothing in these four lines belongs to anyone but the two speakers. A pause that exists to let onlookers respond would need onlookers in it.

   Correct. Structure is the argument here. Goneril and Regan have just spent long, ornamented speeches buying their thirds, and Cordelia answers in one word, then the same word again, then hears it thrown back at her twice by her father: “Nothing will come of nothing.” Four lines of monosyllables sit at the centre of a ceremony made of eloquence, and the turning point of the whole tragedy happens inside them. A reader could argue the real turn comes later, when Lear disowns her; the tell is that by the end of line 6 he is already threatening, which means the break has happened.

   Her longer speech does not retract or refine the “nothing”; it explains why she said it. Treating a considered refusal as hesitation gives a decisive character a weakness the text does not grant her.

   Tempting, because a one-word question often means “say that again.” But Lear's next line answers the content rather than asking for a repeat: he argues with the word, and then offers her another attempt. Read what a character does immediately after a question to learn what the question meant.

9. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i, excerpt lines 10–11.

   10 LEAR. How, how, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
   Lest you may mar your fortunes.

   Lear's response in lines 10–11 most clearly reveals that he

   has already forgiven Cordelia and intends to restore the third he had set aside for her is unaware that anything material depends on what his daughters say in the ceremony is still running the ceremony as a bargain, offering to sell her portion back to her for better words, which is exactly the exchange her “Nothing” refuses to enter no longer holds the power to alter a division of the kingdom he has already announced

   “Lest you may mar your fortunes” is a warning about loss, not an offer of restoration. He is holding her inheritance over the conversation, which is the opposite of setting it aside.

   He is the one who attached the stakes in the first place: the third is “more opulent” by the measure of what she says. A king who names the price cannot be unaware of it.

   Correct. Look at the two verbs he puts side by side: “mend your speech” and “mar your fortunes.” Better words, better estate; the rate of exchange is stated in a single line. This is why the scene is a turning point for him and not only for her: pressed by the one daughter who will not trade, he does not reconsider the trade, he raises the price. A reader might call this simple temper; the tell is that the sentence is conditional and commercial rather than angry, which suggests he still believes she will take the deal.

   He plainly retains the power: he threatens to use it in this very line, and he uses it within the scene. Confusing a decision already spoken with a decision that can no longer be changed misses how much of this scene Lear controls.

10. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, King Lear, I.i.

    A student argues that Cordelia's “nothing” is not a refusal to love her father but a refusal to price her love. Which line from the excerpt most directly supports that reading?

    “I love your majesty / According to my bond; nor more nor less.” “Nothing, my lord.” “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.” “How, how, Cordelia! mend your speech a little.”

    Correct. The claim has two halves, and this line is the only one in the excerpt that carries both. “I love your majesty” states the love outright, so the refusal cannot be a refusal to love; “According to my bond; nor more nor less” then fixes the amount and declines to inflate it, which is precisely a refusal to bid. Evidence that answers every part of a claim at once is what lets a line of reasoning move forward instead of stalling.

    This is the moment the claim is about, not evidence for it. On its own “Nothing, my lord” is silent on whether she loves him, which is exactly why the student's reading needs a different line to stand on. Quoting the thing you are interpreting is not the same as supporting the interpretation.

    The words are Lear's. A claim about what Cordelia refuses cannot be proved by what her father says about arithmetic, however neatly his line fits the theme of exchange. Check whose mouth a quotation comes out of before you build on it.

    Also Lear's, and it supports a claim about him: that he is still bargaining. It is good evidence for the wrong argument, which is a harder error to spot than a simply irrelevant quotation and the reason strong readers name the claim before they choose the line.

Lesson 4.1 · Unit 4 · Short Fiction II · CHR 1.D

Character relationships and what they reveal

Two people in a scene are two positions on one event. A relationship becomes evidence the moment you stop asking how they feel about each other and start asking what each is doing with the same minute.

The meaning sits in the gap. What one of them needs the moment to mean, and what the other declines to make it mean, is an asymmetry you can point to, and an asymmetry is arguable, which a feeling never is.

Lesson 4.2 · Unit 4 · Short Fiction II · CHR 1.C

Foils and contrasting characters

A foil is not a villain and not a sidekick. It is a character set beside another so that one quality in the other becomes impossible to miss, the way a plain wall makes a shape visible.

The test is quick: take the foil away and ask what you can no longer see. If the answer is nothing, you have found a contrast, not a foil. And the foil is often the narrator, who stands nearest of all.

Lesson 4.3 · Unit 4 · Short Fiction II · STR 3.D

Contrast and shift: finding the sentence where a story turns

Stories turn, and they usually turn in one sentence. Find it and you have the spine of an essay: everything before it belongs to one arrangement of a life, everything after it to another.

The turn is rarely an event. More often it is a change of register, the vocabulary or the rhythm shifts, and a reader tracking only the plot walks straight past the most important line.

Lesson 4.4 · Unit 4 · Short Fiction II · SET 2.C

Setting and the character shaped by it

Unit 1 asked what a setting does in a moment. This one asks what it does over weeks: the difference between a place that colors a scene and a place that is a condition somebody lives under.

A room works on a person the way weather works on a coastline: never in the sentence you are reading, always in the accumulation. So hunt for details that carry duration: wear, repetition, fittings installed for somebody else.

Lesson 4.5 · Unit 4 · Short Fiction II · NAR 4.B, 4.C

Narrative distance: a narrator inside a character's idiom

A third-person narrator can stand at any distance from the person it reports on, and the distance can change inside a sentence. When it closes all the way, the narration starts borrowing the character's own words, and you have to decide whose judgment you are reading.

That decision is where tone lives. Joyce's narrator in “Clay” speaks Maria's vocabulary while arranging her sentences in a way Maria never would, so the writing is fond and unsparing at once. Naming a tone proves nothing; showing the words that hold two tones together is the work.

Lesson 4.6 · Unit 4 · Short Fiction II · LAN 7.C

Building a line of reasoning

Row B stalls at two points when a response is full of true claims that have nothing to do with one another. A set of accurate observations is not an argument. A line of reasoning is an order in which each claim makes the next one possible.

The test is a sentence you can say out loud: because the first thing is true, the second thing follows. If “and also” works just as well as “because,” you have written a list.

Unit 4 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 4 review: contrast, distance, and relationship

Ten exam-style items built on two stories this unit did not teach, Chekhov's “Misery” and Joyce's “Counterparts”, so that the unit's skills have to travel to text you are meeting cold; answer each one before you open its explanation.

Multiple choice

1. Passage A. About the text: Anton Chekhov, “Misery,” first published 1886; translated by Constance Garnett for her Tales of Chekhov (1916–1922). The opening of the story; the paragraph continues past the excerpt.

   The twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses' backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost. He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent. If a regular snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it necessary to shake it off. His little mare is white and motionless too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse. She is probably lost in thought.

   In context, the details of the falling snow in the first two sentences primarily serve to

   fix the season and the hour precisely so that the reader can date the events that follow lay a covering over every surface in the scene, so that the weather has begun to bury the man before the story has even named him warn that the storm will shortly force Iona to give up his post and drive home contrast the warmth of the newly lighted street lamps with the cold of the open sledge

   Twilight and snow do set a time, but that is what the sentences say, not what they do; an answer that stops at the information a detail carries is a paraphrase wearing the costume of a function. Ask instead what the detail is doing to the figure it lands on.

   Correct. The snow is given a list of things to settle on, “roofs, horses' backs, shoulders, caps”, and the very next sentence puts Iona under the same white layer, “all white like a ghost.” Setting here is not a backdrop but a slow action performed on a body, which is exactly what a setting that works over time does.

   Nothing in the passage points forward to a departure; Iona does not move, and the following sentence insists he would not even shake a snowdrift off. This choice invents a plot where the passage offers a condition.

   The lamps are mentioned, and cold is certainly present, but the passage never sets warmth against cold: the snow falls on the lamps and on Iona alike. A true detail put to a function the text does not support is the commonest wrong answer on this exam.

2. Passage A, above: Chekhov, “Misery,” 1886 (Garnett).

   His little mare is white and motionless too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse.

   The description of the little mare functions chiefly to

   supply a moment of comic relief before the story's grief begins establish that Iona is too poor to keep a healthy animal give Iona a second self, repeating in the animal the stillness already given to the man so that his condition is stated twice and answered by no one mark the mare as the only creature in the story who understands him

   The gingerbread horse is an odd, almost funny image, but calling it relief assumes the passage is trying to lighten something. The comparison is made of stiffness and straight lines, and it lands on a creature described one sentence earlier as “white and motionless too”: the humor, such as it is, points back at the stillness rather than away from it.

   Poverty is a reasonable inference about a sledge-driver, but the sentences are about posture, not condition: stillness, angularity, straightness. Reading a detail for the social fact behind it instead of the effect it produces is how a foil gets missed.

   Correct. A foil need not be another person. The word “too” welds the mare's whiteness and immobility to Iona's, and the second description does not add information so much as double the first: the passage now contains two motionless white figures and no one who speaks. A different reader might argue the mare is simply scenery; the repetition of “white” and “motionless” is what makes the foil reading defensible.

   This is true of the story as a whole, where Iona finally tells his grief to the mare, but it is not true of these sentences, which give her stillness and nothing else. An answer that is right about the work and wrong about the lines quoted is still wrong.

3. Passage A, above: Chekhov, “Misery,” 1886 (Garnett). The passage's last sentence.

   She is probably lost in thought.

   The narration's relationship to the figures it describes is best characterized by this sentence as

   a guess made from outside, offering about the animal the same speculation it has declined to offer about the man a demonstration that the narration can enter the mind of every figure in the scene an outright joke at the mare's expense that fixes the story's tone as satirical the first sign that the mare, not Iona, will turn out to be the story's narrator

   Correct. “Probably” is the whole sentence. The narration stands at the edge of both bodies and guesses, and it has spent the preceding sentences reporting Iona entirely from the outside: posture, whiteness, what he would not bother to do. Distance is being held evenly, and the grief the title promises is still locked inside a man the telling will not open.

   The hedge rules this out. A narration with access would say what the mare thinks, or what Iona thinks; this one says “probably” and stops. Note how quickly an omniscience claim collapses when you read the modal verbs.

   The sentence is dry, and dryness invites the word satire, but satire attacks, and nothing here is being attacked. This is a tone word one notch too strong, the error that costs students the tone question every year: choose the smallest word the evidence will carry.

   Nothing in the passage suggests a change of narrator, and the voice that says “probably” is plainly not the mare's. Distance between a narrator and a character is not the same as a narrator becoming that character.

4. Passage A, above: Chekhov, “Misery,” 1886 (Garnett).

   Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps … He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent.

   The juxtaposition that organizes the whole passage sets

   evening against morning the city against the countryside Iona has left behind a world that will not stop moving against two figures who will not move at all what Iona says aloud against what he privately thinks

   Only evening appears; there is no morning in the passage to set it against. A contrast requires two things actually on the page, not one thing and its absent opposite.

   The story does eventually turn on what Iona has left, but this passage names no countryside. Importing a contrast from elsewhere in the work, or from a summary you half-remember, is the fastest way to lose a structure question.

   Correct. Every verb given to the weather moves, snow “whirling,” lamps just “lighted,” flakes “lying” down in a layer, and every verb given to the two figures refuses to: he “sits … without stirring,” she is “motionless,” and even a snowdrift would not make him shake it off. The passage is built out of that opposition, which is why the stillness registers as grief rather than as rest.

   Iona says nothing in the passage and no thought of his is reported. A contrast between speech and thought needs at least one of them to appear.

5. Passage A, above: Chekhov, “Misery,” 1886 (Garnett).

   A student claims that the opening presents Iona's grief as something that has already stopped him rather than something he is about to feel. Which sentence from the passage, taken up next, would most advance that line of reasoning?

   “The twilight of evening.” “He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent.” “His little mare is white and motionless too.” “Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse.”

   The fragment establishes atmosphere, and atmosphere can support almost any claim, which is precisely the problem: evidence that would fit five different arguments advances none of them. A line of reasoning needs each step to narrow the case.

   Correct. The claim is about a grief that has already finished its work, and this sentence supplies a body held at the limit of what a body can do: “bent as double as the living body can be bent” is an end state, not a reaction in progress. Taking it second lets the next claim ask what could bend a man that far, which is how a paragraph earns Row B's third and fourth points.

   This is strong evidence, but it is evidence for the same point a step later: it extends the stillness outward to the mare. Used second, it repeats the claim instead of advancing it: save it for the move about doubling, once the human stillness has been established.

   The gingerbread horse is the passage's most memorable image, and students reach for it first for that reason. It describes the animal's shape, not the man's condition, so it cannot carry a claim about Iona without a bridge you have not yet built.

6. Passage B. About the text: James Joyce, “Counterparts,” from Dubliners, first published 1914. The opening of the story, in the office where Farrington works as a copying clerk. Joyce marks speech with a dash rather than quotation marks.

   The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent:

   — Send Farrington here!

   Miss Parker returned to her machine, saying to a man who was writing at a desk:

   — Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs.

   The man muttered Blast him! under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up. When he stood up he was tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache: his eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty. He lifted up the counter and, passing by the clients, went out of the office with a heavy step.

   The exchange between Miss Parker and the man at the desk is most notable for

   the open hostility the two of them display toward each other Miss Parker's evident sympathy for the position the man has been put in the man's refusal to obey the order he has been given how little of it passes between them: she relays a summons that is not hers, he curses a third person, and neither one answers the other

   Neither of them says anything hostile to the other; the only heat in the passage belongs to a bell that rings “furiously” and a voice that is “furious,” both of which come from upstairs. Hostility in the room is atmosphere borrowed from elsewhere, not an attitude between these two.

   Sympathy has to be shown by something: a look, a softened phrase, a hesitation. Miss Parker “returned to her machine” and delivers eight words. Reading warmth into a neutral report is how a relationship claim becomes unprovable.

   He does obey: he pushes back his chair, stands, lifts the counter, and goes out. The muttered curse is what obedience sounds like when it cannot be refused, and mistaking the curse for the action is the misreading this item is built on.

   Correct. Nuance in a relationship often lives in what two people decline to make of the same minute. Her sentence names Alleyne, not herself; his sentence, “Blast him!”, is addressed to no one present and answers nobody. Two people share the exchange and neither is really in it, which is the office's arrangement rather than a quarrel between them.

7. Passage B, above: Joyce, “Counterparts,” 1914.

   The man muttered Blast him! under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up.

   Throughout the passage the narration calls Farrington “the man,” even after Mr Alleyne's voice has supplied his name. In context, this choice primarily serves to

   suggest that the narrator does not yet know who the man at the desk is keep him at the distance the office keeps him at: a body summoned by a voice from upstairs rather than a person anyone addresses by name delay his identity so that its later revelation will surprise the reader imply that Miss Parker has forgotten the name of a colleague she works beside

   The narration reports the shouted name in its own second line, so the name is available to it. A narrator who withholds what he has just told you is choosing, not failing.

   Correct. The order is exact: the name arrives as an order (“Send Farrington here!”), and the moment we reach the desk the narration switches to “the man” and stays there through “he was tall and of great bulk.” The telling adopts the office's own way of seeing him, which sets up the story's tone: close enough to hear the muttered curse, cold enough to withhold the name that would make him a person.

   There is no revelation to delay: the reader already has the name. Suspense requires information the reader lacks, and this passage gives the name away before it withholds it, which is the opposite move.

   Miss Parker plainly knows him: she walks straight to his desk with the message. Attributing the narration's word choice to a character's memory confuses who is speaking; “the man” is the narrator's phrase, not hers.

8. Passage B, above: Joyce, “Counterparts,” 1914.

   … a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent … When he stood up he was tall and of great bulk.

   The contrast the passage establishes between Mr Alleyne and Farrington is chiefly one of

   an unseen, piercing voice set against a large and nearly silent body, so that the power in the office belongs to the man who never appears education set against ignorance youth set against age honesty set against deceit

   Correct. Alleyne exists in the passage as sound only (a bell, a tube, a “furious voice,” an accent described as “piercing”), while Farrington is given nothing but physical mass: “tall and of great bulk,” a hanging face, a heavy step. A foil makes something visible that nothing else could, and this pairing makes visible that size is worth nothing here and a voice is worth everything.

   Nothing in the passage measures what either man knows. Farrington is a copying clerk, but copying tells you about his job, not his education, and Alleyne's accent tells you where he is from, not what he has read.

   No ages are given, and neither man is described in terms that imply one. This distractor is the kind of ready-made opposition students supply when they have not checked which contrasts the text actually builds.

   Deceit belongs to later parts of the story, not to these lines, where nobody makes a claim that could be false. Keep a contrast question inside the quoted text.

9. Passage B, above: Joyce, “Counterparts,” 1914.

   When he stood up he was tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache …

   The shift from rapid dialogue to this sustained physical description functions to

   move the scene out of the office and into the street above signal that the narration has stepped backward in time to explain an earlier event introduce a character who has not yet spoken or been referred to hold the action still long enough to measure a body the office has no use for, at the exact moment that body is obeying an order

   He does not reach the street; he goes out of the office and up, and the passage ends with the step, not the destination. Watch the verbs at a shift, “lifted,” “passing,” “went out”, before you relocate a scene.

   The tenses stay put. “When he stood up he was tall” is simultaneous description, not retrospect; nothing earlier is being explained.

   Farrington has already been named by Alleyne's shout and already acted at his desk. A description is not an introduction simply because it is the first time we see someone's face.

   Correct. Notice where the slowdown falls: the sentences pile up size (“tall,” “great bulk,” a hanging face, bulging eyes) in the seconds between the summons and the exit. Structure is doing the argument here, because the reader is made to weigh all that body just as it stands up to be scolded by a voice. Another reader might call the description mere portraiture; its placement is what makes the structural reading defensible.

10. Passage B, above: Joyce, “Counterparts,” 1914.

    All of the following suggest that the office acts on Farrington as a condition rather than serving as a background EXCEPT

    the bell that rings furiously before any person in the room speaks the tube that brings a voice down from a floor he cannot see the fair eyebrows and moustache set in his dark wine-coloured face the counter he has to lift before he can leave his own desk

    The bell does act on him: it starts the passage, it is “furious” before any human is, and the room reorganizes around it. A setting that issues the first sound is a setting with authority over the people in it.

    The tube is the room's machinery for carrying power downward, and it lets Alleyne reach Farrington without being present. That is architecture doing work a character would otherwise have to do.

    Correct: this is the exception. The eyebrows, moustache, and wine-coloured face describe the man himself, and no amount of the office made them; they would be true of him on any street in Dublin. The other three details are things the room does to him, which is what SET 2.C asks you to separate from what he simply is.

    The counter is a small, precise humiliation: a grown man must lift a piece of furniture and file past the clients to answer a summons. Setting presses on him physically in the act of obeying, which is the pattern the other correct choices share.

Lesson 5.1 · Unit 5 · Poetry II · NAR 4.A, CHR 1.E

The speaker as a character: the dramatic monologue

In a dramatic monologue one character talks, at length, to a listener who never gets a line. You hear only his side, and that is the method, not a limitation.

Everything you learn about him he handed over himself, and the useful parts are the ones he did not mean to hand over. Read for the gap between what he thinks he is proving and what his sentences establish.

Lesson 5.2 · Unit 5 · Poetry II · STR 3.D

Structural contrast and the volta

A volta is not a mood swing. It is an argumentative move: the poem builds one case, and at a particular line turns on that case and answers it.

So find the turn, name it by line, and then ask what the poem was arguing before it and what the delay bought. A late turn is one the poem made you wait for, and the waiting is evidence.

Lesson 5.3 · Unit 5 · Poetry II · STR 3.C

Punctuation, syntax, and the line

A line break and a sentence break are different instruments, and a poet can play them together or against each other. Where they disagree, a reader’s attention snags, and the snag is arguable.

Punctuation belongs to structure, not decoration. A dash holds a sentence open; a period shuts it. When a poem ends without shutting, ask what the refusal does rather than calling the style unconventional.

Lesson 5.4 · Unit 5 · Poetry II · FIG 5.D

Imagery and the shift in mood

Poems rarely hold one image steady. A picture is introduced, repeated with a difference, and then either enlarged or taken away, and the reader’s mood follows the picture without being told to.

Your job is to track the pattern and pin the change to a line. “The tone becomes sadder” is a feeling; “at line 10 the poem stops naming things” is an observation someone can check.

Lesson 5.5 · Unit 5 · Poetry II · FIG 6.B

Extended metaphor and conceit

A metaphor compares two things once. An extended metaphor keeps the comparison running, and every further line commits the poet to more of it. A conceit pushes until the pairing is openly improbable.

The weak paragraph explains what the image means. The strong one tests it: which features of the vehicle get used, which are quietly dropped, and where the logic strains. Strain is usually the point, not a flaw to excuse.

Lesson 5.6 · Unit 5 · Poetry II · LAN 7.C

Commentary that explains rather than restates

Most essays that lose Row B points are not missing evidence. They quote well and then say the quotation again in their own words. Naming a device is the same mistake with a technical term attached.

Commentary is the sentence that answers so what: how does this particular wording produce the effect you claimed? If your sentence would still be true with a different quotation pasted in, it is restatement.

Unit 5 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 5 review: structure, shift, and metaphor

Ten exam-style items on two poems this unit did not teach, a ballad by Keats and a lyric by Dickinson, with line numbers printed every fifth line so that you can cite the way a reader will expect you to.

Multiple choice

1. Passage A. About the text: John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” written 1819. Stanzas 1–5 (lines 1–20) of a twelve-stanza poem, in the version printed in Keats's 1820 volume.

   O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
   Alone and palely loitering?
   The sedge has withered from the lake,
   And no birds sing.

   5 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
   So haggard and so woe-begone?
   The squirrel's granary is full,
   And the harvest's done.

   I see a lily on thy brow,
   10 With anguish moist and fever-dew,
   And on thy cheeks a fading rose
   Fast withereth too.

   I met a lady in the meads,
   Full beautiful—a faery's child,
   15 Her hair was long, her foot was light,
   And her eyes were wild.

   I made a garland for her head,
   And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
   She looked at me as she did love,
   20 And made sweet moan.

   Lines 1–12 are best understood as spoken by

   the knight-at-arms, describing his own appearance to himself a questioner who has come upon the knight, whose two questions and one observation supply everything the reader knows before line 13 the lady who appears in line 13 an omniscient narrator standing wholly outside the encounter

   The pronouns rule this out: “thee,” “thy brow,” “thy cheeks.” A speaker who says thee is addressing someone else, and the man addressed does not begin speaking until line 13.

   Correct. The opening voice asks twice “O what can ail thee” and then reports what he can see: a lily, a fading rose. He is a character in the scene, not a frame around it, and the poem's whole design depends on our getting the knight's story secondhand, through someone who met him only after the damage was done.

   The lady never speaks in the poem; she is reported. Assigning a speech to the figure a poem talks about, rather than to the voice doing the talking, is a common first-read error worth training yourself out of.

   Omniscience would not need to ask. The speaker's questions are real questions, and his information is limited to what a face shows, which is precisely why the knight has to answer at line 13.

2. Passage A, above: Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 1819, lines 3–8.

   The sedge has withered from the lake,
   And no birds sing. … The squirrel's granary is full,
   And the harvest's done.

   The images in lines 3–8 work together primarily to

   establish that the poem takes place in late autumn, after the crops have been gathered in suggest that the knight is a farmer who has neglected his own fields surround the knight with a world that has already finished everything it had to do, so that his exhaustion is answered by a season with nothing left in it promise that the knight's strength will return when the spring does

   That is what the images report, not what they accomplish. Late autumn is the literal content; a function question asks what the content is being used for, and a pattern of completed and emptied things is doing more than telling time.

   There is no farm and no neglect. The granary is full and the harvest is done: everything in the landscape has been managed properly, which is exactly what makes the knight's ruin stand out against it.

   Correct. Read the pattern rather than the items: the sedge has withered, the birds have stopped, the granary is full, the harvest is done. Each image names a process already complete, and the speaker lays them beside a man who is “palely loitering”: living on after his own event is over. The landscape is not scenery here; it is the knight's condition, printed large.

   Nothing in the stanzas looks forward. The poem's images run one way, toward things ending, and the next stanza continues that direction with a rose that “fast withereth.” Supplying a consolation the poem withholds is the most tempting misreading of this ballad.

3. Passage A, above: Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 1819, lines 1–4.

   O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
   Alone and palely loitering?
   The sedge has withered from the lake,
   And no birds sing.

   The primary effect of the shortened fourth line that closes every stanza is to

   imitate the rhythm of a horse's gait as the knight rides indicate that a line has been lost from each stanza of the manuscript mark the point at which the poem changes speakers cut each stanza off before its rhythm has finished, so that every four lines arrive at something curtailed

   A gait is regular, and the stanza is not: three long lines and then a short one is a stumble, not a canter. Reaching for a sound-effect explanation is a habit worth breaking: form questions usually reward an argument about expectation, not about imitation.

   The short line is the ballad stanza Keats chose, repeated identically in all twelve stanzas. Treating a deliberate form as damage assumes the poet lost control of the one thing he most obviously controlled.

   The speaker does change, but at line 13: inside a stanza that ends with the same short fourth line as all the others. A feature that occurs every stanza cannot mark an event that occurs once.

   Correct. The ear sets up a four-beat expectation across lines 1–3 and the fourth line refuses to fill it: “And no birds sing,” “And the harvest's done,” “Fast withereth too,” “And made sweet moan.” Structure and subject say the same thing: each stanza runs out early, as the knight has. A reader could argue the short line simply follows ballad convention; the fact that its content is always a subtraction is what makes the stronger reading defensible.

4. Passage A, above: Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 1819, lines 9–12.

   I see a lily on thy brow,
   10 With anguish moist and fever-dew,
   And on thy cheeks a fading rose
   Fast withereth too.

   In context, the lily of line 9 and the fading rose of line 11 primarily serve to

   write the knight's sickness onto his face in the vocabulary the poem has already used for the countryside, so that a man and a season wither in the same words describe actual flowers that the lady has left on the knight's forehead and cheek reveal that the knight has been wounded in a battle he has not yet described praise the knight's beauty in the courtly manner of a medieval love poem

   Correct. The verb is the evidence. “The sedge has withered from the lake” in line 3 returns as a rose that “fast withereth too” in line 12, and the word “too” welds the two withering things together. The metaphors do not decorate the knight's pallor; they enroll him in the landscape's exhaustion, which is why the reader believes in his condition before hearing a word of his story.

   Literalizing a metaphor is the classic FIG error. Nothing is placed on the knight; the speaker sees a lily where the skin is white and a rose where the colour is going, which is how the eye reads a fever.

   Wounds are never mentioned, and “anguish moist and fever-dew” describes sweat and sickness, not injury. Supplying a cause the poem declines to give reduces a mystery to a plot.

   Lilies and roses do belong to courtly praise, which is what makes this choice attractive, but here both flowers are failing, and a compliment that says a man is going pale and losing his colour is not a compliment.

5. Passage A, above: Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 1819, lines 12–13.

   Fast withereth too.

   I met a lady in the meads,

   The shift that occurs at line 13 marks the point at which

   the poem moves out of the present tense and into a dream the speaker is having the questioner falls silent and the knight begins to answer, so that everything after line 12 is his story told inside the first speaker's frame the poem abandons the ballad stanza for a different verse form the lady of the poem begins to speak in her own voice

   The tense does change, from “I see” to “I met”, but the change belongs to a new speaker recalling his past, not to a dream. A dream comes later in the poem; at line 13 we are still in a man's account of something he says happened.

   Correct. Three stanzas of question are answered by nine stanzas of reply, and the hinge is a single unannounced line. This is why the poem cannot be read as a simple tale: the story of the lady reaches us only through a man the first speaker has already described as pale, haggard, and withering, so every claim in it comes pre-shadowed by its own outcome.

   The stanza form does not change: four lines, three long and one short, right through to the end. Look for the structural break in who is speaking and what is being done, not in a form that stays constant.

   The lady is spoken about, never spoken by. Noticing that a poem gives a character no voice is often the beginning of a strong interpretation, but that silence is exactly why this option is wrong.

6. Passage B. About the text: Emily Dickinson, “A Bird, came down the Walk —” (Fr359), written about 1862, first published 1891. Complete, in the text of R. W. Franklin's reading edition.

   A Bird, came down the Walk —
   He did not know I saw —
   He bit an Angle Worm in halves
   And ate the fellow, raw,

   5 And then, he drank a Dew
   From a convenient Grass —
   And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
   To let a Beetle pass —

   He glanced with rapid eyes,
   10 That hurried all abroad —
   They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
   He stirred his Velvet Head. —

   Like one in danger, Cautious,
   I offered him a Crumb,
   15 And he unrolled his feathers,
   And rowed him softer Home —

   Than Oars divide the Ocean,
   Too silver for a seam,
   Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
   20 Leap, plashless as they swim.

   The speaker's position in the first three stanzas is best described as that of

   a watcher who has not been noticed, reporting what a bird does when it believes no one is there a naturalist compiling measurements for a scientific account of a species a child frightened by the bird's treatment of the worm a keeper who has tamed the bird and feeds it every day

   Correct. Line 2 states the arrangement outright, “He did not know I saw”, and everything through line 12 depends on it: the bird eats a worm raw, drinks from a grass, steps aside for a beetle, all without performing for anyone. The poem is a study of unobserved behaviour, which is what makes the speaker's small intervention at line 14 change the whole poem.

   The vocabulary is against it. A naturalist does not write “the fellow,” “convenient,” “frightened Beads,” or “Velvet Head”; those words carry judgment, affection and surprise. The speaker watches closely but is never neutral.

   The worm is bitten “in halves” and eaten “raw,” and the speaker records it without flinching or commenting. Supplying a horror the poem does not express is a tone error: the flatness of the report is the point.

   The bird is wild and the crumb is refused. Line 13's “Like one in danger, Cautious” tells you the speaker approaches this creature warily, on terms she does not control.

7. Passage B, above: Dickinson, “A Bird, came down the Walk —”, lines 15–18.

   15 And he unrolled his feathers,
   And rowed him softer Home —

   Than Oars divide the Ocean,
   Too silver for a seam,

   The syntax that carries line 16 across the stanza break into line 17 chiefly serves to

   correct a grammatical error the poem has made in the preceding stanza signal that the final stanza is spoken by a voice other than the watcher's withhold the comparison until after the stanza has ended, so that the sentence leaves the ground at the same moment the bird does show that the bird has come back and settled in the speaker's hand

   There is no error to correct. “Softer” sets up a comparison, and the poem simply declines to complete it until the next stanza: that is a syntactic choice, not a repair.

   The voice does not change; the sentence does not even stop. A single unbroken clause running across a stanza break is the strongest possible evidence that one speaker is still going.

   Correct. “Softer” at the end of line 16 leaves the reader holding an incomplete comparison across white space, and “Than” arrives only after the stanza has broken. The reader's sentence and the bird's flight are suspended in the same instant, which is why this break does work that a comma could not do. Notice, too, that the dash after “Home” keeps the line open rather than closing it.

   The bird goes away, not toward: “rowed him softer Home.” The crumb was offered and never taken, and nothing in the last two stanzas brings the bird back.

8. Passage B, above: Dickinson, “A Bird, came down the Walk —”, lines 16–20.

   And rowed him softer Home —
   Than Oars divide the Ocean,
   Too silver for a seam,
   Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
   20 Leap, plashless as they swim.

   The comparison developed in lines 16–20 is best described as

   a simile comparing the bird's feathers to polished silver a personification that gives the ocean the character of a rower an allusion to a classical myth in which a bird is changed into a fish a conceit that turns flight into rowing and air into water, then tests the comparison twice, against oars that leave a seam and butterflies that swim without a splash

   “Too silver for a seam” describes the surface the oars divide, not the bird's feathers, and the line is about a wake that closes without a mark. Attaching a modifier to the wrong noun is how a conceit gets shrunk to a simile.

   The ocean is not given human qualities; it is what the oars divide. The rowing belongs to the bird, and the comparison runs from creature to boat, not from sea to person.

   No myth is named or implied. This distractor tests whether you will accept an impressive-sounding label without evidence: allusion questions require a specific text or figure being pointed at.

   Correct. The metaphor is not stated once but extended and then pushed: rowing implies water, water implies a wake, and Dickinson answers the implication by making the surface “Too silver for a seam,” then adds a second measure, butterflies that “Leap, plashless as they swim.” The comparison is being asked how far it can stretch, and its answer is that this flight disturbs nothing at all.

9. Passage B, above: Dickinson, “A Bird, came down the Walk —”, lines 13–16.

   Like one in danger, Cautious,
   I offered him a Crumb,
   15 And he unrolled his feathers,
   And rowed him softer Home —

   The change in the poem's imagery after line 14 functions to

   replace the ground-level imagery of biting, drinking and hopping with oceans, banks of noon and seamless motion, so that the bird's refusal of the speaker is also the poem's release into another element show that the bird takes the crumb and grows tame in the speaker's company move the poem indoors, where the speaker can observe the bird more closely introduce a second bird so that the two may be compared

   Correct. Pin the shift to the line. Through line 12 every image is small, hard and close: an “Angle Worm in halves,” a “convenient Grass,” a “Wall,” “frightened Beads.” From line 15 the vocabulary is vast and frictionless: Oars, Ocean, Banks of Noon, swimming. The tonal change is not a mood the reader supplies; it is a documented change in the kind of noun the poem uses, and it begins the instant the bird declines the crumb.

   The crumb is offered and never accepted. The bird's answer to the offer is to unroll its feathers and go, which is the opposite of taming and the reason the last two stanzas feel like an escape.

   Nothing moves indoors; the poem's final images are the widest it has: an ocean and banks of noon. This choice reverses the poem's actual direction, from close to vast.

   The butterflies of line 19 are a second term in a comparison, not a second creature in the scene. Distinguishing what a poem shows from what it compares something to is half of reading figurative language correctly.

10. Passage B, above: Dickinson, “A Bird, came down the Walk —”, lines 16–20.

    A student writes: “Dickinson compares the bird's flight to rowing, which shows that the flight is smooth.” Which revision best converts that observation into commentary?

    “Dickinson uses an extended metaphor of rowing across the final two stanzas of the poem.” “The flight is described with words such as ‘rowed,' ‘Oars,' ‘Ocean,' and ‘swim.'” “Rowing is the one kind of motion that leaves a wake, so the poem has to keep taking the wake back (the water is ‘Too silver for a seam,' the butterflies ‘plashless'), and the comparison ends up measuring the flight by everything it fails to disturb.” “The bird's flight is beautiful, and the ending shows Dickinson's deep love of the natural world.”

    This names the device more precisely than the original, and naming is where most drafts stop. A reader who knows the term already knows the poem uses it; the sentence still does not say what the metaphor accomplishes, which is why it sits at Row B level 2.

    Listing the words is evidence without commentary. Quotation is necessary and not sufficient: Row B's higher points require the sentence that explains how those particular words support the claim.

    Correct. It starts from the logic of the comparison, uses two short quotations chosen for their wording, and explains what the quoted words do to the claim: a metaphor of rowing would normally imply disturbance, and the poem spends its last lines cancelling exactly that implication. That is the “so what” sentence: the flight is defined by an absence the metaphor makes measurable.

    This is warmer than the original and less useful. “Beautiful” and “love of nature” could be written about almost any Dickinson poem without reading this one, and a claim that survives without the text cannot be supported by it.

Lesson 6.1 · Unit 6 · Longer Fiction or Drama II · CHR 1.B, 1.E

Character evolution across a long work

A short story can build a character. A novel has to change one, and prove the change was earned. Four hundred pages give a writer room to plant a habit, keep it, test it, and break it in a single scene.

So read a long work for the moment a character's own language turns around. Before it she is explaining other people; after it she is explaining herself.

Lesson 6.2 · Unit 6 · Longer Fiction or Drama II · SET 2.A, 2.B

Setting, atmosphere, and mood across a whole work

In a short story a setting gets one paragraph. In a novel it becomes a climate you live under for three hundred pages.

A long work's setting establishes an expectation and then enforces it. Ask two things of an opening description: what does it promise, and what does it make impossible?

Lesson 6.3 · Unit 6 · Longer Fiction or Drama II · NAR 4.B, 4.D

Point of view and narrative distance in a long work

In a short story you ask who is speaking. In a long work you also ask how far the teller now stands from what he is telling, and whether the story is even his.

Ishmael is the extreme case: he opens the novel in the first person and then hands most of it to another man's obsession.

Lesson 6.4 · Unit 6 · Longer Fiction or Drama II · FIG 5.C

Symbols and motifs

A motif is a thing that comes back. A symbol is a thing the work has made to mean. The difference is not in the object but in what has been done with it by the time you meet it again.

A play has its own way of doing it. It cannot narrate significance, so it puts an object, a sound, or an exit exactly where the significance already is.

Lesson 6.5 · Unit 6 · Longer Fiction or Drama II · STR 3.C, 3.E

The structure of a play: acts, scenes, and the soliloquy

A play wears its structure on the outside. Acts and scenes are labeled, which makes them easy to mistake for the whole of the architecture.

The structure that pays is inside the speeches. A soliloquy is an argument with a shape, and in tragedy the shape is usually a defeat: the character reasons to one conclusion and does the other thing.

Unit 6 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 6 review: change, mood, and symbol

Ten exam-style items on a novel and a play this unit did not teach, the interrupted wedding in Jane Eyre and the Ghost's charge in Hamlet, both of them scenes in which a long work turns on a few lines.

Multiple choice

1. Passage A. About the text: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, first published 1847; volume II, chapter 11 (chapter 26 in one-volume editions), at Jane's wedding to Mr. Rochester. Immediately before the excerpt the clergyman has delivered the prayer-book charge that asks whether either party knows of any impediment to the marriage. Jane narrates.

   He paused, as the custom is. When is the pause after that sentence ever broken by reply? Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years. And the clergyman, who had not lifted his eyes from his book, and had held his breath but for a moment, was proceeding: his hand was already stretched towards Mr. Rochester, as his lips unclosed to ask, “Wilt thou have this woman for thy wedded wife?” — when a distinct and near voice said:

   “The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment.”

   The clergyman looked up at the speaker, and stood mute; the clerk did the same; Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under his feet: taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head or eyes, he said, “Proceed.”

   In context, the two sentences beginning “When is the pause after that sentence ever broken by reply?” primarily serve to

   show that Jane is uncertain about what actually happened at her own wedding open a gap between the girl standing at the altar and the narrator remembering her, who already knows how rare this interruption is and says so before it comes report a remark the clergyman makes aloud to the congregation establish that the narrator was not present and has reconstructed the scene from others' accounts

   Uncertainty is the one thing these sentences do not express. “Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years” is a confident generalisation about weddings in general, made by someone who has had years to think about this one.

   Correct. The present tense gives it away: “When is the pause … ever broken.” For two sentences the novel leaves 1840-something and speaks from the desk where Jane is writing, addressing a reader directly. That distance is the frame this whole scene is delivered through: we are watching a woman narrate the worst minute of her life from safely outside it, which is why the prose can be so composed while the event is not.

   Nothing marks these sentences as speech; the quotation marks in the excerpt belong to the clergyman's formula and to the voice from the back of the church. Attributing a narrator's aside to a character is a distance error worth checking for whenever a sentence changes tense.

   Jane is the bride; she is as present as anyone in the room. A retrospective narrator is not an absent one, and confusing distance in time with distance in place is the misreading this option is built on.

2. Passage A, above: Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847, ch. 26.

   … his hand was already stretched towards Mr. Rochester, as his lips unclosed to ask, “Wilt thou have this woman for thy wedded wife?” — when a distinct and near voice said …

   The placement of the interruption, after the clergyman's hand is already out and his lips already open, chiefly functions to

   suggest that the clergyman knows the objector and has been waiting for him indicate that the ceremony will be delayed by only a few minutes set the break at the last instant the scene allows, so that the sentence which stops the wedding arrives inside the sentence that would have completed it establish the physical layout of the church for the confrontation that follows

   The text says the opposite: he “had not lifted his eyes from his book,” and a moment later he “looked up at the speaker, and stood mute.” Surprise, not collusion.

   The objection is not a delay; it is an impediment declared, and the paragraph's own diction, “cannot go on”, refuses the idea of resumption. Treating a structural turning point as a pause in the schedule flattens the scene into plot summary.

   Correct. Brontë spends a full clause getting the clergyman's hand up and his mouth open, and then cuts across him with a dash. Structure is doing the work of shock here: a reader who has been told nothing ever breaks this pause is made to watch the machinery of the ceremony get all the way to its last question before it is stopped mid-sentence. Move the interruption two lines earlier and the scene loses precisely this.

   No layout is given: we learn only that the voice is “distinct and near.” A true observation about a different kind of detail cannot answer a question about placement.

3. Passage A, above: Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847, ch. 26.

   Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under his feet: taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head or eyes, he said, “Proceed.”

   Mr. Rochester's reaction is best described as

   the calm of a man to whom the objection is a complete surprise panic that he proves unable to conceal from anyone present indifference to a claim he regards as beneath answering a man absorbing a blow he understands at once, then spending a single word on the attempt to make the ceremony continue as though nothing had struck him

   Calm is the surface, but the simile beneath it is an earthquake, and a man genuinely surprised does not need to take “a firmer footing.” The sentence gives you the shock and the suppression in the same clause; an answer that takes only the suppression has read half of it.

   He conceals it almost entirely: he does not turn his head or his eyes, and he speaks one steady word. What the reader sees is not visible to the congregation; it reaches us only through Jane's simile, which is a different thing from public panic.

   Indifference would not move at all. “Moved slightly” and “taking a firmer footing” are the actions of a man bracing against something he has felt, and “Proceed” is a command issued against an interruption, not a dismissal of one.

   Correct. This is a character revealing himself in a gesture rather than a speech. The earthquake registers the recognition; the firmer footing and the refusal to turn register the decision to go on anyway; and “Proceed” is the whole of his answer. A reader could argue he is merely stubborn: the tell is that he does not ask who is speaking or what the impediment is, which suggests he already knows both.

4. Passage A, above: Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847, ch. 26.

   The clergyman looked up at the speaker, and stood mute; the clerk did the same …

   The detail that the clergyman “stood mute” and that “the clerk did the same” contributes most to the mood of the scene by

   emptying the church of the voices that were running the ceremony, so that the only sounds left in it are the objection and Rochester's one word showing that both men privately disapprove of the marriage being performed proving the clerk to be the more attentive and quick-witted of the two men suggesting that a legal authority is about to arrive and take charge of the matter

   Correct. Atmosphere in this passage is made of who is allowed to speak. The clergyman had a script and loses it; the clerk, whose whole office is to answer, copies the silence; and into that vacuum fall exactly two utterances, “I declare the existence of an impediment” and “Proceed.” The church becomes a room with no official voice in it, which is what makes the scene feel less like a ceremony than a standoff.

   Muteness here is shock, not judgment. The clergyman was mid-question and had not so much as lifted his eyes; nothing in the excerpt gives either man an opinion about the marriage.

   “Did the same” makes the clerk an echo, not a rival: the phrase exists to double the silence, not to rank the two men. A detail included for its repetition should be read for what the repetition produces.

   No such arrival is hinted at in the excerpt. Importing the novel's later developments into a mood question replaces what the scene is doing with what you remember happening next.

5. Passage A, above: Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847, ch. 26. The clergyman's charge, just before the excerpt, asks whether either party knows of any impediment.

   The word “impediment” carries unusual weight in the excerpt chiefly because

   Jane has used the same word earlier to describe her private misgivings about the marriage it is a technical term whose meaning the narrator stops the scene to explain the ritual has just used it as an empty formality that expects no answer, and the voice from the back of the church hands it back as a fact it appears only this once in the whole of the novel

   The excerpt gives no such earlier use, and an item about a word's weight has to be answerable from the text in front of you. Build the case from the repetition you can point to.

   The narrator explains nothing; she comments only on how seldom the pause is broken. A word that stops a wedding does not need glossing, and the scene's speed depends on its not being glossed.

   Correct. This is how a repeated word turns into a symbol: the first use is liturgy (a formula the narrator has just told us is never answered, “not, perhaps, once in a hundred years”), and the second use is a declaration, in a “distinct and near voice,” that the thing the formula names exists. The word does not change meaning; the church's relation to it does, and the whole second half of the novel proceeds from that reversal.

   Frequency is not weight, and a claim about the whole novel cannot be checked against this excerpt. Notice that the passage's power comes from the word appearing twice within a page, not once in five hundred.

6. Passage B. About the text: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene v (first printed 1603–1623), the Ghost's first speech to Hamlet on the battlements. Lines are numbered as printed here, from the beginning of the excerpt.

   GHOST. I am thy father's spirit,
   Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
   And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
   Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
   5 Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid
   To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
   I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
   Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
   Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
   10 Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
   And each particular hair to stand an end,
   Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
   But this eternal blazon must not be
   To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
   15 If thou didst ever thy dear father love—

   HAMLET. O God!

   GHOST. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

   The Ghost's speech is organized chiefly as

   a list, in order of occurrence, of the crimes committed against him a refusal that turns into a command: he names a tale he is forbidden to tell, spends five lines on what telling it would do, withholds it, and asks for something else instead a prayer for release from purgatory, addressed to God rather than to Hamlet an argument that Hamlet should distrust what he has been told about his father's death

   No crime is narrated at all until the last line, and even there it is named, not described. The speech is remarkable precisely for how much it declines to say.

   Correct. Track the turns: “I am forbid / To tell” (a prohibition), “I could a tale unfold” (a withheld narrative), five lines of consequences, “But this eternal blazon must not be” (the refusal repeated), and then the swerve, “List, list, O, list!”, into a demand that has nothing to do with the tale. Structure is the argument here: the Ghost builds enormous pressure around a secret and then spends it on an order.

   The Ghost addresses Hamlet throughout, “thy father's spirit,” “thy young blood,” “thy dear father”, and asks nothing of God. The fires and the prison-house are description, not petition.

   Distrust of the official account is a fair summary of Hamlet's position later; it is not what the speech does. The Ghost never mentions what Denmark has been told, and reading the play's premise back into its lines is a habit to catch.

7. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v, excerpt lines 8–12.

   Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
   Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
   10 Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
   And each particular hair to stand an end,
   Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

   All of the following describe the function of the figurative language in lines 8–12 EXCEPT

   it measures an untold tale by the physical damage its lightest word would do it converts a knowledge the living cannot have into effects a body would register it descends from the celestial to the small and domestic, ending on an animal's quills it specifies the nature of the crime the Ghost has come to report

   This is a function the lines perform. The tale itself is withheld, so its size can only be given indirectly, by what “whose lightest word” would do to a listener. Measuring the unsaid by its effects is the speech's central manoeuvre.

   This is also a function they perform. Soul, blood, eyes, hair: the Ghost translates “the secrets of my prison-house” into a sequence of things that happen to flesh, which is the only vocabulary “ears of flesh and blood” could receive.

   This too is accurate. The comparisons fall from eyes like stars leaving “their spheres” to hair standing like “quills upon the fretful porpentine”: cosmic to barnyard in four lines, so that the horror ends up close enough to touch.

   Correct: this is the exception. The lines specify nothing about the crime; the word “murder” does not arrive until the excerpt's last line, and its manner is never given here. An EXCEPT item usually hides the right answer among three true statements, so test each option against the quoted lines rather than against the play.

8. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v, excerpt lines 3–5.

   And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
   Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
   5 Are burnt and purg'd away.

   In context, these lines most clearly reveal that

   the figure about to demand vengeance for a murder admits, in the same breath, to crimes of his own that are not yet burnt away the Ghost was a blameless king whose murder was the only wrong committed in his reign the Ghost is describing hell, from which no release is possible the Ghost has already been forgiven and now speaks from a place of rest

   Correct. “The foul crimes done in my days of nature” are his own, committed while he was alive, and the adjective “foul” returns twelve lines later attached to the murder he wants avenged. A character who uses the same word for what was done to him and what he did is a complicated figure to take orders from, and the play never resolves the question this opening raises about the authority of its own ghost.

   The lines say the reverse. He is serving a term for crimes of his own, which is why he walks at night and fasts in fires by day. Reading a character as innocent because he is wronged is a habit the exam is designed to catch.

   The punishment is explicitly temporary: “for a certain term,” and “Till” the crimes “Are burnt and purg'd away.” A sentence with an end is not hell, and the difference matters to how much trust the speech asks for.

   He is mid-sentence in every sense: doomed, confined, fasting, and waiting to be purged. Nothing here is finished, and rest is what he does not have.

9. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v.

   The Ghost's relationship to the events he reports is best characterized as that of

   a disinterested witness whose account could be checked against other testimony the injured party, who is also the sole source for the injury, and who rules out in advance the questions that might test him a messenger faithfully repeating words that were given to him by someone else a bystander who saw the murder committed but had no part in the events himself

   He is the least disinterested figure available: the victim, asking for revenge. And there is no other testimony: the speech forbids the very disclosures that would produce any.

   Correct. Notice how the prohibition and the demand fit together: “But that I am forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison-house” closes off the ground on which he stands, and “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” asks Hamlet to act on what remains. A narrator whose credibility cannot be examined is a structural problem for a play, not merely a character trait: Hamlet spends two acts inventing a way to test it.

   Nobody sends him and nobody supplies his words; he speaks as the father himself, in the first person, from his own punishment. A messenger can be checked against the one who sent him, which is exactly the safeguard this speech lacks.

   He is not a bystander: the murdered man is himself, named in the third person only in the final line, where “his … murder” means his own. Watch for pronouns doing quiet work at the end of a speech.

10. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v, excerpt lines 14–17.

    To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
    15 If thou didst ever thy dear father love—

    HAMLET. O God!

    GHOST. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

    The interruption of line 15 by Hamlet's “O God!” primarily functions to

    show that Hamlet has stopped listening to the Ghost indicate that the Ghost has finished what he came to say split the Ghost's conditional sentence before its demand arrives, so that “Revenge” returns as a line of its own with only Hamlet's cry between the condition and the command reveal that Hamlet already knows who killed his father

    The cry is the sound of listening too well. He has just been told his father's spirit walks in fire, and “List, list, O, list!” has demanded his whole attention; the interruption proves the demand worked.

    The Ghost's most important line has not yet been spoken. A speech broken off mid-clause is a speech about to continue, and the shape of the conditional, “If thou didst ever …”, guarantees a demand is coming.

    Correct. Shakespeare sets the hinge of the play across three speeches. Line 15 opens a condition and stops; Hamlet fills the gap with two syllables; and the imperative lands alone, at the head of its own line, where nothing softens it. Had the Ghost said it all in one breath, “Revenge” would be the end of a sentence; broken this way, it is the beginning of everything after it.

    He does not: he learns the manner of the death only later in the scene, and his reaction here is horror at the speaker, not recognition of a suspect. Confusing an emotional outburst with knowledge is how readers over-read a two-word line.

Lesson 7.1 · Unit 7 · Short Fiction III · CHR 1.B, STR 3.E

Sudden change and what a late reversal asks of a reader

A story can spend forty pages building a man and then undo him in a paragraph. When the undoing comes at the end, it is not one more event in the sequence. It is an instruction about how to read the sequence.

So do not stop at what changed. Ask what caused the change, what it costs, and what the earlier pages mean now that you cannot unread it.

Lesson 7.2 · Unit 7 · Short Fiction III · NAR 4.D

Unreliable narration: reading past the teller

A narrator can be wrong without ever being caught in a lie. Unreliability is rarely a false statement you can disprove; it is a way of speaking that gives you reason to doubt the speaker while he is busy being convincing.

That doubt has to be built out of his own sentences. Disliking a narrator proves nothing. Being able to point at the word where he overplays his hand proves something.

Lesson 7.3 · Unit 7 · Short Fiction III · STR 3.D, FIG 5.A

Irony: who knows what, and when

Irony is not a tone you sprinkle on a paragraph. It is a relationship between two kinds of knowledge: what is said and what is meant, what was intended and what arrived, what a character knows and what you know.

So the word is useful only once you can say who holds which knowledge. Name the two parties first; the label follows.

Lesson 7.4 · Unit 7 · Short Fiction III · NAR 4.D, LAN 7.B

Ambiguity: when a text refuses to resolve

Some gaps do not close on rereading. The Turn of the Screw has one at its center: either the governess sees ghosts at Bly, or she supplies them, and both readings survive to the last page.

That is not a licence to write “it could mean anything.” A text that supports two readings still rules out a hundred others, and your thesis has to do the ruling out.

Lesson 7.5 · Unit 7 · Short Fiction III · FIG 5.C

Symbol and theme in short fiction

A symbol is not assigned; it is earned. A writer puts an object in front of you, then brings it back under different pressure, and the second appearance means what the first one could not.

Theme works the same way. The exam does not want a moral about life: “people are hypocrites” fits a thousand stories. It wants a claim about this work, in the terms the work uses.

Lesson 7.6 · Unit 7 · Short Fiction III · LAN 7.C

Sophistication: tension, complexity, and alternative readings

Row C is worth one point, and it is the point students chase hardest and miss most. It is not paid for a beautiful last sentence, a thought about the human condition, or “some readers might argue.”

It goes to an argument that stays complicated on purpose: a tension named and held open, an alternative reading taken seriously, or a reading set in a wider context. You earn it by refusing to tidy the text up.

Unit 7 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 7 review: Short Fiction III

Ten questions on two passages you have not met in the lessons, the opening sentences of a Poe confession and of a Hawthorne marriage, covering the unit's work on late reversal, unreliable narration, irony, ambiguity, theme, and the kind of claim that actually earns Row C; click an option to see why it is right or wrong.

Multiple choice

1. About the text: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post, 19 August 1843. Passage A: the opening paragraph, quoted through its seventh sentence.

   For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them.

   The movement from “Mad indeed would I be to expect it” to “Yet, mad am I not” serves chiefly to

   establish that the narrator has been examined by others and found sane raise the question of the narrator's sanity, which then hangs over everything he reports announce that the narrative to follow will be a confession of a crime he regrets separate his account from the dreams and visions of ordinary Gothic tales

   No examination and no verdict appear anywhere in the passage; the narrator is the only person who has brought his sanity up, and a denial that no one asked for is the reason a reader cannot treat it as a finding.

   Correct. He introduces the word mad twice before a single event is described, first as a concession and then as a denial, so the first thing the passage puts in front of a reader is not the household events but the mind reporting them.

   He does say that he dies tomorrow and would unburthen his soul, but the two clauses named in the stem are about his mind rather than his guilt, and no word of regret appears in these sentences.

   “Very surely do I not dream” does insist on waking fact, but that is a different claim from “mad am I not”; treating sanity and wakefulness as one assurance is the misreading, since a man may be wide awake and still unreliable.

2. Passage A, above: Poe, “The Black Cat,” 1843.

   My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.

   In context, the promise to set the events down “plainly, succinctly, and without comment” is ironic chiefly because

   the events he has to report are too ordinary to require any comment he admits one sentence later that he will not attempt to explain them the sentences around it are neither plain nor free of comment on his own condition he plans to publish the account rather than keep it to himself

   He calls the events mere household events, but the next sentence says they terrified, tortured, and destroyed him, so the passage does not let a reader treat them as ordinary.

   Refusing to expound the events is consistent with promising no comment, not at odds with it; a narrator who withholds explanation is keeping that promise rather than breaking it.

   Correct. Before this sentence he has called his narrative “most wild, yet most homely,” argued twice about his sanity, and announced his execution: self-commentary in a heavily dashed, inverted style, which is exactly what plainness and no comment would rule out.

   Publishing rather than hiding the account explains why he is writing at all; it says nothing about the manner he promises, and irony here depends on manner.

3. Passage A, above: Poe, “The Black Cat,” 1843.

   Placing “But to-morrow I die” before any account of the events has the primary effect of

   settling the narrator's fate at the start so that the reader attends to how he arrived at it fixing the exact date on which the household events occurred showing that the document is an official statement prepared for a court implying that the narrator still expects to be pardoned

   Correct. The ending is handed over in the fourth sentence, so there is no suspense left about what becomes of him; what remains for the reader to judge is the chain of causes, which is the pressure the story wants.

   The clause dates the writing, not the events: the household events are said to lie behind him, and the passage never places them on a calendar.

   He addresses “the world” and speaks of unburthening his soul, which is the language of a confession written for readers; nothing marks this as testimony filed with a court.

   “To-morrow I die” is flat and unhedged, and the urgency of unburthening his soul today depends on there being no reprieve; hope would undo the sentence's work.

4. Passage A, above: Poe, “The Black Cat,” 1843.

   … a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me.

   The phrase “a series of mere household events” stands in sharpest tension with

   “I neither expect nor solicit belief” “my very senses reject their own evidence” “Yet I will not attempt to expound them” “have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me”

   That clause is about whether readers will accept the story, not about how large the events are; a narrator can ask for no belief at all and still call his material small.

   This clause concerns the reliability of his perceptions rather than the scale of what he perceived, so it presses on the narrator, not on the word mere.

   Declining to expound fits the word mere rather than fighting it: a man who thinks his material ordinary has nothing much to explain.

   Correct. Mere household promises the small and the domestic, and the next clause escalates through three verbs to destroyed; holding the ordinary word and the catastrophic one in adjacent sentences is the paragraph's method.

5. Passage A, above: Poe, “The Black Cat,” 1843.

   Which of the following claims about Passage A would be most defensible on the evidence of these sentences alone?

   The narrator is lying about the events in the hope of escaping punishment. The passage makes the narrator's reliability, rather than the events, the first thing a reader must judge. The passage shows that what happened has driven the narrator mad. The passage cannot be interpreted, since nothing a disturbed narrator says can be trusted.

   Nothing here suggests a motive to deceive: he expects to die tomorrow and asks for no belief, which is the opposite of pleading. A thesis has to be defensible from the text, not merely dramatic.

   Correct. Every sentence before the events arrive is about the teller: his expectations, his senses, his sanity, his death, his manner. That is evidence for a claim about what the opening does, and it leaves the question of his madness genuinely open.

   The passage denies this outright and offers no event to support it either way. Choosing a reading the text explicitly contests, with nothing to answer the denial, is the error this unit keeps warning about.

   This is the “it could mean anything” non-thesis. Unreliability narrows the questions a reader can settle; it does not cancel interpretation, and an ambiguous text still supports arguable claims about how its ambiguity is built.

6. About the text: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” first published in The Pioneer, March 1843, collected in Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846. Passage B: the opening; the second paragraph is quoted to the end of its first sentence.

   In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife.

   In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. …

   The order of the actions in the first paragraph (leaving the laboratory, cleaning his face and hands, persuading a woman to marry him) characterizes Aylmer chiefly as

   a man who has given up science for the sake of love a man whose neglect of his appearance has cost him socially a man who conducts a courtship as the last step in a sequence of preparations a man changed against his will by an emotion he did not expect

   The sentence says he left the laboratory to the care of an assistant, which is delegation, not renunciation, and it keeps the marriage inside the same list as washing acid off his fingers.

   The smoke and the acid stains are removed in the course of a single clause and treated as the ordinary residue of the work; the paragraph never reports a social cost.

   Correct. Four verbs run in one series (left, cleared, washed, persuaded), so the wife arrives as the fourth item on a list of arrangements, and the order of the sentence is itself the characterization.

   Nothing in the paragraph is involuntary: he had already “made experience of a spiritual affinity” and weighed it against the chemical ones, and every verb in the list is something he does on purpose.

7. Passage B, above: Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” 1843.

   … who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one.

   In describing Aylmer's marriage as “a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one,” the narrator

   measures a human attachment on the scale Aylmer uses in the laboratory states plainly that Aylmer loves his wife more than he loves his science indicates that Aylmer's experiments have so far produced nothing of value identifies the marriage as a religious rather than a worldly commitment

   Correct. Affinity and attraction are the chemist's words for what makes substances combine, and the comparison rates the wife against reagents; the marriage is reported in the vocabulary of the work it supposedly interrupts.

   This is the paraphrase trap. The sentence ranks one affinity above another at one moment, which is a comparison of attractions, not a declaration about the whole of his life, and the next paragraph immediately reminds us how often science wins that contest.

   The narrator calls him “an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” so his standing is established, not questioned; the sentence is about what drew him away, not about failure.

   “Spiritual” here is set against “chemical” to mark a difference of kind, a person rather than a compound, and the story treats the attachment as an earthly one; reading it as piety loses the joke the pairing is making.

8. Passage B, above: Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” 1843.

   The second paragraph differs from the first chiefly in that it

   introduces the wife's view of the marriage casts doubt on the facts the first paragraph has reported moves forward in time to the first events of the story proper widens from one man's marriage to the temper of the age that produced him

   The wife is still only “a beautiful woman” who has been persuaded; she is given no thought, no speech, and no name in either paragraph, and that silence is itself worth noticing.

   The second paragraph supports the first rather than undercutting it: it explains why a man of that period might weigh a wife against a discovery at all.

   Time does not advance here. “In those days” steps back from the story's clock to describe a whole period, which is why the paragraph can generalize about what was “not unusual.”

   Correct. Paragraph one reports one marriage; paragraph two names the era of electricity and “the region of miracle” and tells us how common such a rivalry was, so Aylmer becomes a specimen of his age rather than an oddity.

9. Passage B, above: Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” 1843.

   All of the following contribute to the narrator's ironic distance from Aylmer EXCEPT

   the ranking of a wife against a chemical affinity the placement of the marriage at the end of a list of tidying actions the statement that he had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant the phrase “our story,” which reminds a reader that someone is arranging the account

   This does create distance: measuring a woman on the scale of attractions invites a reader to see the habit of mind that Aylmer cannot see, which is how ironic distance is built.

   This creates distance too. The syntax equates persuading a wife with washing his hands, a judgment the sentence delivers by order alone, without a word of criticism.

   Correct. This is the one piece of plain plot in the paragraph: an arrangement he made, reported without evaluation. It tells you the laboratory is still running; it does not invite you to look down on him.

   This creates distance by making the narrator visible: “our story” admits a teller who has chosen where to begin, and a visible teller is one a reader can stand beside.

10. Passage B, above: Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” 1843.

    Which of the following states a theme suggested by Passage B as an arguable claim about the story rather than as a moral about life?

    People should never place the pursuit of knowledge above the people who love them. Hawthorne presents devotion to knowledge as a kind of appetite, so that Aylmer's marriage reads as an acquisition rather than a surrender. A brilliant scientist leaves his laboratory and marries a beautiful woman. In the eighteenth century, people believed that science was on the verge of working miracles.

    This is advice, not interpretation. A theme statement has to be arguable about the text, someone must be able to disagree with it and go to the words to check, and no one will argue against a maxim.

    Correct. It makes a claim about what the author's presentation does, it names the evidence that would prove it (the list of verbs, the chemical vocabulary), and a reader could defend the opposite view that the marriage genuinely draws him out of the laboratory.

    This is accurate summary. Plot restated is the most common substitute for a thesis, and it earns nothing in Row A because there is no interpretation in it to defend.

    This is historical context, and the second paragraph does supply it, but a theme must be a claim about the work; background belongs in commentary that explains the text, not in place of it.

Lesson 8.1 · Unit 8 · Poetry III · FIG 5.A, 5.B

Ambiguity in diction: words that hold two meanings

A poem can mean two things at once without being confused. When a word carries two live senses and the lines around it support both, the doubleness is the poem's work, not a puzzle to solve and throw away.

So when a word could go two ways, don't choose the reading you like and move on. Run each sense through the rest of the poem and see what it forces the other lines to mean. Sometimes one reading breaks a later line and drops out. Sometimes both survive, and saying so, with the evidence for each, is the strongest thing you can write about the poem.

Lesson 8.2 · Unit 8 · Poetry III · STR 3.C

Form as argument: what a sonnet's shape is for

A sonnet is not fourteen lines with a rhyme scheme attached. It is a machine for staging an argument: a stretch of lines to make a charge, a turn where the footing changes, and an ending that claims to settle the case.

That is why “the poem is a sonnet” earns nothing on its own. The point is what each part is given to do, and whether the closing lines actually win the argument or only sound like they have.

Lesson 8.3 · Unit 8 · Poetry III · STR 3.D, NAR 4.C

Mapping the shifts in a poem

Most poems change direction more than once, and the changes are rarely announced. A shift can be a tense, a person addressed, a new image, a conjunction, even a piece of punctuation. Each one is a decision, and the pattern they make together is usually your thesis.

So before you write anything on Q1, spend five minutes marking the poem: bracket every place something changes and write one word beside it for what the change does. The map costs almost nothing and it stops you from writing a paragraph on the first stanza and running out of poem.

Lesson 8.4 · Unit 8 · Poetry III · FIG 5.C, 6.D

Symbol, allusion, and context

An allusion is a poem borrowing a scene you already know and expecting you to bring it. That makes outside knowledge useful, and dangerous, because it is easy to spend a paragraph proving you recognized the reference and never return to the poem.

The rule is simple: context comes in to make the poem's own words mean more, then you go straight back to those words. And when your knowledge and the poem disagree, don't correct the poet. Ask what the figure is being asked to do.

Lesson 8.5 · Unit 8 · Poetry III · LAN 7.B, 7.C, 7.E

Writing the poetry essay under time

Forty minutes is enough for a six-point essay and not enough for a good one written badly. The students who run out of time almost never run out of ideas; they run out because they started writing before they knew what they were arguing.

So spend the first nine minutes not writing. Read twice, mark the shifts, and commit to a thesis that names an interpretation and the two techniques you will use to prove it. Everything after that is execution.

Unit 8 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 8 review: Poetry III

Two complete short poems and ten questions on the unit's work: diction that holds two meanings, form used as an argument, every shift mapped and given a function, an allusion the reader has to supply, and the thesis you would write if the clock were running.

Multiple choice

1. About the text: Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” first published 1868 and collected in Leaves of Grass. Passage A: complete, ten lines; the numbers 5 and 10 mark those lines.

   A noiseless patient spider,
   I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
   Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
   It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
   5 Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

   And you O my soul where you stand,
   Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
   Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
   Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
   10 Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

   The relation of the second stanza to the first is best described as

   a contrast that reverses the claim the first stanza has made a second look at the same spider from a nearer vantage point an analogy, in which the terms used to watch the spider are turned on the speaker's own soul a conclusion explaining why the spider's effort came to nothing

   Nothing is reversed: the soul is given the spider's own posture and verbs (isolated, ever unreeling, ceaselessly throwing), so the second stanza agrees with the first rather than arguing against it.

   The spider is not looked at again after line 5. What returns is its behavior, transferred to something that has no body at all, which is a change of subject, not of distance.

   Correct. Stanza one supplies the terms (a thing isolated on a promontory, launching filament out of itself into vacancy) and stanza two spends them on the soul, surrounded and detached in “measureless oceans of space”: the two halves are the two sides of one comparison.

   The poem never reports an outcome for the spider or the soul. The last two lines are still waiting, “till … till … till”, and that unfinished grammar is the point of the ending.

2. Passage A, above: Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” 1868.

   It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
   5 Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

   The primary effect of the repetition in “filament, filament, filament” (line 4) is to

   make the reader register the spinning as continuing labor rather than a single act suggest that the spider is producing far more thread than it can use imitate the sound the spider makes while it works stress how thin and easily broken each separate thread is

   Correct. The word is spent three times where one would do, so the line takes as long to read as the work takes to do, and line 5 then names that duration outright with “ever … ever.”

   Waste is not in view anywhere in the poem; the filaments come “out of itself,” which measures cost to the spider rather than surplus, and the soul's version of the act is urgent, not extravagant.

   The poem's first word is noiseless, so sound is ruled out by line 1. This is the trap of naming a device's usual effect instead of testing it against the poem in front of you.

   Fragility does arrive, but later and in a different word: the “gossamer thread” of line 10. Repeating a noun three times insists on quantity and persistence, not on delicacy.

3. Passage A, above: Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” 1868.

   And you O my soul where you stand,
   Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

   The shift that occurs at the opening of the second stanza functions chiefly to

   move the poem from night to daylight replace observation with address, so that what the speaker watched becomes something he requires of himself introduce a second speaker who answers the first drop the comparison before it has been completed

   The poem gives no time of day at all. Reading a shift as a change of scene is the habit to break: mark what changes in the language first; here, the grammar of who is being spoken to.

   Correct. The verbs in stanza one are past and observed (“I mark'd”); stanza two turns to “you O my soul” and never returns to the spider, so a scene that was being studied becomes a charge laid on the speaker himself.

   There is one voice throughout. The apostrophe addresses a part of the speaker, which is why the last three words circle back to “O my soul” rather than to another person.

   The comparison is not dropped but carried out: the soul receives the spider's isolation, its throwing, and its thread, and the poem ends inside the analogy rather than stepping out of it.

4. Passage A, above: Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” 1868.

   Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
   10 Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

   The apparent contradiction in “the ductile anchor” (line 9) serves chiefly to

   signal that the speaker doubts his soul will ever take hold correct the spider comparison, since a spider casts no anchor indicate that the anchor is made of a metal soft enough to be hammered thin name what the soul requires: something drawn out like thread that will nevertheless take hold

   Doubt would need a word like if; the line says till, which assumes the holding will come and only leaves its timing open. Tone one notch too dark is a common wrong turn here.

   The spider comparison is being extended, not corrected: a web is exactly a structure that is spun out and then must catch, which is why bridge, anchor, and thread can share three lines.

   Ductile does describe metals that can be drawn into wire, and that literal sense is worth knowing; but taking the line as a fact about materials leaves the soul out of a sentence addressed entirely to it.

   Correct. Ductile means able to be drawn out and anchor means able to hold fast, so the phrase asks one object to do both at once, which is the condition the soul's reaching would have to meet, stated in two words.

5. Passage A, above: Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” 1868.

   You have forty minutes and this poem. Which of the following would work best as the essay's thesis?

   Whitman uses a spider as a metaphor for the human soul. Whitman's poem contains repetition, apostrophe, and a two-stanza structure. By giving the soul the spider's verbs and then leaving its threads still in the air, Whitman makes the soul's reaching tireless labor with no promised result. Whitman shows that everyone feels alone and wants to connect with other people.

   True, and a reader who has finished the poem already knows it. A thesis has to be arguable; identifying the vehicle of a comparison is where the thinking starts, not where it stops.

   This is an inventory. Naming devices without saying what they accomplish is capped low in Row B, and it gives the essay no line of reasoning to follow from paragraph to paragraph.

   Correct. It names an interpretation someone could contest, it points at two elements (the transferred verbs and the unresolved “till” construction), and it tells you what each body paragraph has to prove.

   Nothing in this sentence could be checked against the poem's words, and it would fit a hundred other poems. Row C is not earned by widening the claim until it cannot be wrong.

6. About the text: Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” first published in The Yale Review, October 1923, and collected in New Hampshire, 1923. Passage B: complete, eight lines.

   Nature's first green is gold,
   Her hardest hue to hold.
   Her early leaf's a flower;
   But only so an hour.
   Then leaf subsides to leaf.
   So Eden sank to grief,
   So dawn goes down to day.
   Nothing gold can stay.

   The relation of the poem's second half (lines 5–8) to its first half is best described as

   an extension, taking a fact about new leaves into a series of larger losses a reversal, withdrawing the claim the opening lines have made a restatement, saying the opening observation again in other words a prediction, turning from present description to what will happen next spring

   Correct. Lines 1–4 stay inside one budding tree; line 5 states the sequence, and lines 6 and 7 apply the same verb pattern to the Fall and to daybreak, so the span widens with every line until line 8 can say nothing.

   The second half confirms the first. Each “So” clause is offered as another instance of the same motion, something bright settling into something ordinary, not as an exception to it.

   Repetition of shape is not repetition of content: Eden and dawn are not the leaf restated, they are two further cases, and the poem's argument depends on the difference in scale between them.

   The poem never looks ahead to another spring. Its tenses stay general (subsides, goes down, can stay), which is how an observation becomes a rule.

7. Passage B, above: Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 1923.

   Nature's first green is gold,
   Her hardest hue to hold.

   In line 1, “gold” works chiefly by

   replacing the color of the leaves with an image of wealth that the poem goes on to criticize naming a color the first growth really has while keeping the sense of value, so the loss is at once visible and moral alluding to the golden age of classical myth describing the light of early sun rather than the leaf itself

   No criticism of wealth appears anywhere in the eight lines, and the color is not replaced: “green is gold” insists that the literal tint is the valuable thing, which is a stranger and better claim.

   Correct. New leaves really do come in with a yellow cast, so the word is accurate description; and because gold also means precious, line 8 can generalize to everything worth keeping without changing a word.

   The poem's one allusion arrives in line 6, and it is biblical rather than classical. Importing a myth the text does not invoke is the opposite of using context to illuminate a poem.

   Line 1 assigns the color to “Nature's first green”, to the foliage, and line 2 calls it a hue that Nature struggles to hold, which keeps the gold in the leaf rather than in the sky.

8. Passage B, above: Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 1923.

   Then leaf subsides to leaf.
   So Eden sank to grief,

   “So Eden sank to grief” (line 6) requires the reader to supply

   a particular verse of Genesis that the line is quoting the story of the Fall, which lets one spring morning stand for loss in general a classical myth about a garden of golden apples a private memory of the speaker's that the poem declines to explain

   An allusion points; it does not quote. Frost gives one proper noun and one verb and trusts you to bring the rest, which is why hunting for the exact verse misses the work the line is doing.

   Correct. The name carries a whole narrative of perfection that did not last, and once it is set beside the leaf and the dawn, the poem can claim the pattern holds for everything: a scale it could never earn from foliage alone.

   The golden apples belong to the Hesperides, and Frost's word is Eden; answering with the nearest myth that contains gold is the reading to avoid when an allusion is named precisely.

   There is no first-person speaker in this poem and no memory in it. The context a reader must supply here is public and shared, which is exactly what makes the shorthand work.

9. Passage B, above: Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 1923.

   The turn at “Then leaf subsides to leaf” (line 5) chiefly

   introduces a speaker who had not been present before returns the poem to the single tree with which it opened moves the poem from describing one tree to stating a pattern, after which each line covers a longer stretch of time reverses the poem's direction by promising that the green will return

   No “I” enters the poem at any point. When you map shifts, check whether the change is in person, tense, image, or syntax: here it is a move from particular to general, with the voice unchanged.

   Lines 1–4 were already the tree; line 5 leaves it. The tell is Then, which starts a sequence, and the two “So” lines that immediately extend it beyond any orchard.

   Correct. An hour of flowering becomes a sequence, a sequence becomes the history of Eden, and Eden becomes every sunrise: three lines, three widenings, which is what lets the last line speak as law.

   Nothing returns. Subsides, sank, and goes down all point the same way, and the poem closes on a denial rather than a promise.

10. Passage B, above: Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 1923.

    All of the following help the final line land as a law rather than as one more observation EXCEPT

    the parallel construction of the two clauses beginning “So” the widening from one tree to Eden to every daybreak the flat, unqualified phrasing of “Nothing gold can stay” the alliteration of “Her hardest hue to hold” (line 2)

    The parallel clauses do help: two cases stated in the same shape imply a rule that a third case would also fit, so the last line arrives as the rule they were both instances of.

    This helps as well. By line 7 the claim has already been applied to the largest available examples, so “nothing” in line 8 sounds like a summary of ground the poem has covered rather than an overstatement.

    This helps too: no almost, no seems, no subject with a name: the sentence drops every qualifier a description would carry, which is how a line sounds like a statute.

    Correct. The hammering h's are a pleasure of line 2 and they keep attention on that one tree, but sound-patterning inside an early descriptive line does nothing to widen the poem's claim; the generalizing work is done by the sequence in lines 5–7.

Lesson 9.1 · Unit 9 · Longer Fiction or Drama III · CHR 1.E

Complex characters and competing motives

A long work gives a character room to want two incompatible things at once, and to act on both. When that happens, students often write as though the author slipped. Read it the other way: the contradiction is the characterization.

Your job is not to resolve it. It is to say what the work gains by leaving it open, and to point at the words where the two motives touch.

Lesson 9.2 · Unit 9 · Longer Fiction or Drama III · SET 2.B, FIG 5.C

Setting as symbol: a place that becomes an idea

A place stops being scenery when a book keeps returning to it. Each return adds something (a mood, a conversation, a refusal) until the place is carrying an idea the novel never states outright.

That accumulation is what turns a setting into a symbol, and it is also what makes your claim provable. You argue from the returns, not from one beautiful sentence.

Lesson 9.3 · Unit 9 · Longer Fiction or Drama III · STR 3.C, 3.E

Structure, pacing, and the function of an ending

A novel does not run out; it stops. Where it stops is the last move in its argument, and the move is often a refusal: the scene the book has taught you to want, withheld on the final page.

So read an ending the way you read a plot. What do the last pages get spent on, and what does the writer decline to stage at all?

Lesson 9.4 · Unit 9 · Longer Fiction or Drama III · FIG 5.C, LAN 7.B

Theme: from pattern to interpretation

Theme is not a topic. “Guilt” is a topic. “The novel argues that guilt kept private does not stay private” is a theme: a claim a reader could refuse.

A claim that size has to be earned across the whole book, and the dependable way to earn it is to find something the work repeats and then argue about what the repetition changes.

Lesson 9.5 · Unit 9 · Longer Fiction or Drama III · LAN 7.C, 7.D, 7.E

The Q3 argument: sustaining a claim about a whole work

Q3 hands you a prompt and no text. Everything comes out of a book you already carry, which changes what counts as evidence: not the passage you can quote, but the scene you can describe exactly and locate.

So choose a work you know at chapter level, and organize by idea. An essay that walks the plot in order is a summary with a thesis on the front.

Unit 9 review · 10 multiple-choice

Unit 9 review: Longer Fiction or Drama III

Run this one like a piece of Section I (a prose passage and a passage of dramatic verse, five questions each, about twenty minutes), and answer every item before you open a single rationale, since the click is where the review starts rather than where it ends.

Multiple choice

1. About the text: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, first published 1818; volume 1: the night the creature wakes (chapter 4 in the 1818 text, chapter 5 in the 1831 revision). Victor Frankenstein is telling his story to Robert Walton. Passage A: the paragraph complete, and the first sentence of the next.

   It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

   How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? …

   The narrator's relation to the night he describes is best characterized as

   a record set down at the time, as the events were happening an account by an observer who took no part in what he reports a telling from long afterward, by a man who already knows how the night ended a reconstruction assembled from what other witnesses later told him

   The tenses are all past and the last sentence steps outside the scene to ask “How can I describe”: a question put by someone at a distance from the night, with the work of telling in front of him.

   He is the one who collected the instruments and infused the spark; the whole passage runs on the first person. A narrator inside the events he judges is precisely what makes the judgments worth testing.

   Correct. He calls the moment “this catastrophe” before anything catastrophic has happened in the scene, and “the accomplishment of my toils” is the phrase of a man who has since learned what the accomplishment cost: hindsight is doing the describing.

   Nothing is secondhand here. He reports his own hands, his own candle, and his own emotions, which is why the question a reader must keep asking is how far to trust him, not whether he was there.

2. Passage A, above: Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818.

   … the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open …

   The rain on the panes and the candle nearly burnt out function chiefly to

   fix the season and the hour for a reader who would otherwise be lost set a light that is going out against the moment a life is beginning suggest that Victor has exhausted the money and materials his work required raise the possibility that the storm will interrupt the experiment

   The date and the hour are given plainly elsewhere in the sentence (November, one in the morning), so the rain and the candle are not carrying that information; they are doing something the clock cannot do.

   Correct. The one thing in the room that is dying is the candle, and Shelley makes its “half-extinguished light” the only means by which the eye can be seen, so the creature's first instant is lit by something guttering out.

   Expense is never mentioned. Reading physical detail as a signal of the character's finances is the kind of guess that survives only until you check it against the words on the page.

   The weather stays outside the panes and threatens nothing; the eye opens in the same sentence. Setting here builds atmosphere and meaning rather than plot pressure.

3. Passage A, above: Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818.

   With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me …

   The phrase “an anxiety that almost amounted to agony” most clearly indicates that

   dread and desire are present in the same act, before Victor has seen any result Victor has begun to doubt whether the science he is using is sound Victor is afraid of being discovered at his work by the university Victor already regrets the project and means to abandon it

   Correct. The sentence that contains near-agony is the sentence in which he keeps working, and it sits between “the accomplishment of my toils” and “a spark of being”: triumph and torment in one motion, which is what a complex character looks like on the page.

   His confidence in the method is not in question: he is collecting the instruments and expecting them to work, and the creature does wake. Anxiety about an outcome is not doubt about a technique.

   Secrecy is a real strand of the novel, but nothing in these sentences mentions discovery, and the anxiety is fastened by the grammar to the act of infusing life, not to the risk of being seen.

   Regret belongs to the telling rather than to the night: the retrospective words are “catastrophe” and “wretch.” In the moment itself he completes the work, so reading abandonment here collapses the two time frames.

4. Passage A, above: Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818.

   It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open …

   The clauses that stand between “It was already one in the morning” and “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open” serve chiefly to

   explain the scientific procedure Victor has been following delay the awakening so that a reader will expect the attempt to fail show that Victor's attention had drifted away from his work crowd the sentence with ordinary particulars, so that the awakening arrives inside a domestic clause instead of as a spectacle

   No procedure is described anywhere in the passage. Shelley withholds the method entirely, which is one reason the novel can keep its attention on the maker rather than on the machinery.

   Suspense would need a doubt, and the sentence supplies none; its middle is filled with rain and a candle, the two least suspenseful things in the room.

   He is watching closely enough to see one eye open by a failing glimmer, so his attention is on the table. The clock, the rain, and the candle are the room's furniture, not evidence of distraction.

   Correct. The hour, the weather, and the guttering candle come first, and the eye opens in a subordinate clause introduced by “when”: the most important event in the novel is given the grammar of an interruption to an ordinary night.

5. Passage A, above: Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818.

   Which of the following states, as an arguable claim about the passage, an interpretation its language will support?

   Shelley warns her readers that scientists should not meddle in matters reserved to God. Shelley makes Victor's horror a verdict on his own expectations: “catastrophe” names his reaction, since nothing catastrophic has yet occurred. Shelley shows that the creature is malignant from the first instant of its life. Shelley describes a scientist who succeeds in giving life to a body on a rainy November night.

   This is a moral, and one the passage does not state. It also cannot be argued from these sentences, which mention no divine prohibition: a thesis must be defensible from the text a reader has in front of them.

   Correct. It is contestable, and it is checkable: the creature has breathed and moved its limbs, nothing more, while the words catastrophe and wretch both come from the man who wanted it and are supplied by hindsight.

   The creature does nothing in the passage but breathe hard and move convulsively. Taking Victor's language as a report of the creature's nature is to accept the narrator's judgment as fact, which is the habit this unit works to break.

   Accurate, and therefore useless as a thesis: a summary no one would dispute gives an essay nothing to prove and earns nothing in Row A.

6. About the text: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene v: Macbeth's reply when he is told that the queen is dead. First printed in the Folio of 1623; spelling as in standard modern editions. Passage B: twelve lines, numbered from the start of the excerpt.

   She should have died hereafter;
   There would have been a time for such a word.
   To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
   Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
   5 To the last syllable of recorded time;
   And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
   The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
   Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
   That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
   10 And then is heard no more. It is a tale
   Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
   Signifying nothing.

   Macbeth's response to the news of his wife's death is best described as

   an outpouring of grief that he struggles to keep under control a confession of guilt for the killings he has ordered a refusal of mourning that turns almost at once into a verdict on time itself an expression of relief that the last claim on him has been removed

   There is no struggle and no outpouring: two flat lines about timing, and then she is not mentioned again. The absence of grief-language in a speech occasioned by a death is the fact an essay should start from.

   Guilt never appears. He indicts time, life, and the fools lighted to dusty death: a general arraignment that leaves his own conduct carefully out of the charge.

   Correct. Line 1 declines the occasion by quarrelling with its timing, and by line 3 the subject has become tomorrow, yesterday, and “recorded time,” so a wife's death is answered with a theory of duration.

   Relief would be a feeling about her, and the speech has none; every figure after line 2 is about existence in general, which is what makes the coldness structural rather than personal.

7. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.

   She should have died hereafter;
   There would have been a time for such a word.

   In context, “She should have died hereafter” (line 1) most nearly means

   her death has come when there is no room for it; later, there would have been time for such news she ought to have died long before this day she deserved a more honorable death than the one she was given she will be remembered by those who come after her

   Correct. Line 2 glosses line 1: hereafter means at some later time, and “a time for such a word” is what he says he lacks now. Readers also hear a second sense, she would have died sooner or later in any case, and the line is strong enough to hold both.

   This reverses the direction of hereafter, which points forward, not back. Test a paraphrase against the next line: “There would have been a time” can only mean a time still to come.

   Nothing in these lines weighs the manner of her death or its honor; his complaint is about when the news arrives, which is a stranger and colder objection than wounded dignity.

   This mistakes hereafter for posterity. The word here belongs to the clock he is about to attack in lines 3–5, not to memory or reputation.

8. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.

   Out, out, brief candle!
   Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
   That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
   10 And then is heard no more. It is a tale
   Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
   Signifying nothing.

   The sequence of figures in lines 7–12 (candle, walking shadow, poor player, tale told by an idiot) develops chiefly by

   moving from images of light toward images of darkness growing steadily more violent as the speech proceeds returning at the end to the image with which the speech began stripping away in turn life's light, its substance, its voice, and finally its meaning

   Light is only the first figure; shadow, player, and tale are not darker versions of a candle but different kinds of thing altogether, and a light-to-dark reading has nothing to say about the idiot or the stage.

   Violence belongs to “sound and fury,” which the last line then cancels as meaningless noise. The movement is toward emptiness, and emptiness is the opposite of escalation.

   The speech began with his wife and with timing, not with a candle, and it never returns to her: that failure to circle back is itself worth an essay's attention.

   Correct. Snuff the candle and the light goes; a walking shadow has no body; a player is heard no more when his hour ends; a tale told by an idiot still makes noise but signifies nothing: each figure removes one more thing a life might have.

9. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.

   Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
   Signifying nothing.

   The primary effect of ending the speech on the short line “Signifying nothing” is to

   break the verse line off early, so that the form performs the emptiness the sentence asserts show that Macbeth has been cut off mid-thought by the messenger who enters indicate that Macbeth has lost the ability to speak in verse at all soften the speech by letting it trail away into silence

   Correct. Every other line here runs its full length; this one stops several syllables short, so the pentameter that has carried the whole speech gives out on the word nothing: the line is missing exactly what it says life lacks.

   The messenger arrives after the sentence has closed, not inside it: the grammar is complete and the thought is finished. A short line is a metrical fact first, and only sometimes an interruption.

   The lines around it are regular verse, including the two immediately before, so nothing has broken down in his speech; what has been cut is one line's length, deliberately and at the end.

   The effect is a stop, not a fade. A truncated line lands hard because the ear is still waiting for the missing feet, which is the opposite of trailing off.

10. Passage B, above: Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.

    A student arguing that this speech marks the end of Macbeth's capacity to be moved would best support that claim with

    the three repetitions of “To-morrow” in line 3 the fact that his first answer to his wife's death is a complaint about its timing the phrase “dusty death” in line 7 the claim that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot” in lines 10–11

    The repetition is strong evidence: for a claim about tedium and the crawl of time. Choosing the most famous phrase rather than the one that fits the argument is the most common evidence error on Q3.

    Correct. The claim is about feeling, so the evidence has to be about feeling: told that his wife is dead, he objects to the scheduling, and never mentions her again. Evidence should touch the exact nerve of the thesis.

    This supports a claim about mortality or about the futility of ambition, and it is about “all our yesterdays” rather than about Macbeth's response to a particular loss.

    This supports a claim about meaninglessness, which is related but not the same: a man can find life absurd and still be capable of grief, so the line does not by itself close the argument.

Poetry analysis 1 · 40 minutes

Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Shakespeare uses structure and figurative language to convey the speaker's complex attitude toward memory and loss.

Poetry analysis 2 · 40 minutes

Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Hardy uses setting, imagery, and the poem's final stanza to convey the speaker's complex attitude toward the remembered relationship.

Poetry analysis 3 · 40 minutes

Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Dickinson uses personification, the ordering of the journey, and shifts in the final stanzas to convey the speaker's complex understanding of death.

Poetry analysis 4 · 40 minutes

Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Dunbar uses the extended comparison of the caged bird, repetition, and sound to convey the speaker's complex understanding of confinement and song.

Poetry analysis 5 · 40 minutes

Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Frost uses the poem's form, diction, and closing question to convey a complex attitude toward diminishment and change.

Prose analysis 1 · 40 minutes

The following excerpt is from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813). In this passage Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennet. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Austen uses dialogue, narration, and irony to characterize Mr. Collins and Elizabeth and the relationship between them.

Prose analysis 2 · 40 minutes

The following excerpts are from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), with a summary of the scene they come from. In this scene Jane, a governess at Thornfield, answers her employer Mr. Rochester in the orchard after he tells her she must leave. Read the summary and the excerpts carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Brontë uses figurative language, syntax, and the interplay of the two speakers to convey Jane's complex state of mind.

Prose analysis 3 · 40 minutes

The following excerpts, with a summary of the chapter they come from, are from Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899). Chapter 6 interrupts the story of Edna Pontellier's summer on Grand Isle to describe what has begun in her. Read the summary and the excerpts carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Chopin uses narration, figurative language, and the structure of the chapter to convey the complexity of Edna's awakening.

Prose analysis 4 · 40 minutes

The following excerpt is from Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911). In the passage, Ethan Frome walks home from a village dance with Mattie Silver, a young relative of his wife who keeps house for them. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Wharton uses narration, detail, and figurative language to convey Ethan's complex experience of the walk.

Prose analysis 5 · 40 minutes

The following exchange is from Act I of Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Algernon has discovered an inscription in his friend's cigarette case that does not match the name his friend goes by in town, and presses him about it. Read the excerpts and the summary below carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Wilde uses dialogue, epigram, and the contrast between the two men to convey the play's attitude toward respectability.

Literary argument 1 · 40 minutes

Many works of literature feature a character who conceals a truth from the people around him or her. The concealment may protect the character, the community, or another person, and it usually costs something. Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a character's concealment is central to the work. In a well-written essay, analyze how that concealment contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

You may select a work from the list below or another novel or play of comparable literary merit: The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) · Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) · Hamlet (Shakespeare) · Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) · The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) · A Doll's House (Ibsen) · The House of Mirth (Wharton) · The Turn of the Screw (James) · Persuasion (Austen) · Frankenstein (Shelley).

Literary argument 2 · 40 minutes

In many works of literature a character refuses a role that family, community, or society expects that character to accept. The refusal may be spoken or silent, and it always costs something. Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which such a refusal occurs. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the refusal and its consequences contribute to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
• Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879)
• Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853)
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

Literary argument 3 · 40 minutes

Works of literature often present a figure who stands outside a community: by birth, by choice, or by the community's refusal: and whose exclusion exposes something about that community. Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which such a figure appears. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the character's exclusion contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878)
• Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (written 1891)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Literary argument 4 · 40 minutes

In some works of literature a place is more than a backdrop: it shapes what the characters can want, do, or become. Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a particular place carries that weight. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the place contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
• Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
• Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
• Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
• James Joyce, Dubliners (1914)
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
• Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

Literary argument 5 · 40 minutes

Some works of literature end without settling the central question they raise, leaving the reader to weigh the possibilities. Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction with such an ending. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the lack of resolution contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

• Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899, Garnett translation)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)
• Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879)
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
• James Joyce, “The Dead” (Dubliners, 1914)
• Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (written 1891)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Unit recap

Unit recap

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