Sample PaperProcess:
Original idea for pattern:Larson keeps mentioning Burnham’s and Holmes’s eyes
- Okay, this is WAY too broad a pattern. Remember, you must analyze ALL of the examples of the pattern, and your paper is only 3-5 pages long, so you can’t deal with 46 examples.
- You need to narrow down the pattern. There are many ways of doing this. For a pattern like the one above, an obvious thing to do is just pick Holmes or Burnham. That will cut the examples down quite a bit.
New Pattern Suggestion: Larson keeps mentioning Holmes’s eyes
Okay, the next step is to gather up the evidence. Find ALLof the places where Larson writes about Holmes’s eyes. [At the moment, we’re only up to p. 127, but so far, what came up with in class was…]
-p. xi
-p. 35
-p. 37 (3x)
-p. 39
-p. 40
-p. 42* (“his astigmatic soul” not eye description per se, but close enough to warrant a look)
-p. 46
-p. 63
-p. 65 (2x)
-p. 87
-p. 91
-p. 123
-p. 125
- That is still 16 examples. Too many! We need to narrow it down more.
- Look at the examples above and see if you can detect subpatterns. Not all examples will fit eachsubpattern (because more than one thing is going on here!). But try to group like with like. Probably one of the easiest patterns to see is the following:
Final Pattern: Larson keeps mentioning that something is wrong with Holmes’s eyes—an emptiness or something missing.
-p. xi : NO
-p. 35: NO
-p. 37: NO (none of the 3!)
-p. 39: YES
-p. 40: YES
-p. 42*: MAYBE—slight aberration, but probably useful(eyes as the window to the soul?)
-p. 46: NO
-p. 63: NO
-p. 65: NO on both
-p. 87: NO
-P. 91: NO
-p. 123: YES
-p. 125: YES
- This gets us down to five examples. Much more manageable. Now…
Figuring out Purpose: Why is Larson describing Holmes’s eyes in this way? How does it help him accomplish any purpose?
An excellent tie to purpose can be found on pages 87-88. On the paragraph at the bottom of p. 87, Larson writes, “Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could causes them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing.”
That element of humanness being missing ties in nicely with Holmes’s eyes being empty or flat. The purpose becomes even clearer on the next page when Larson goes into what a “Cleckley psychopath” is—and here is your connection to purpose.
Why mention the psychopath information?
Purpose: Larson is trying to diagnose Holmes. Why is he trying to diagnose Holmes? (Attempting to do such a thing is an uncertain business at best. It is not like we can raise Holmes from the dead and give him a psychiatric evaluation). Why would Larson take on such a difficult and uncertain task? Because Larson is trying to explain why Holmes did the things he did.
Connection between pattern and purpose: Larson takes the diagnosis/explanation and works an element of it (the element of humanness being missing) backwards into his early description of Holmes (the emptiness in his eyes) so that by the time you get to 87-88, you feel that “Cleckley psychopath” is a correct diagnosis. As a reader, you may feel like you have actual evidence to support such a conclusion—even though this feeling is actually due to a manipulation of language by Larson, NOT real evidence. The descriptions of Holmes’s eyes are all Larson; they are not based on other sources. His word choice is substituted for actual evidence. Tricky, tricky stuff, and partly why Larson is SO concerned with credibility elsewhere in the book. It gives him the ability to pull this kind of thing off under the radar, even with a pretty educated, astute audience. This pattern/purpose would make an excellent paper. THIS is the kind of thing we want.
*** Note: You should never swerve in the direction of blue = symbolism/archetype whatever. That is fiction/literary analysis fluff that is totally useless here—worse than useless, actually, because a paper based on something like that will fail outright.