English 165: Slaughterhouse Five Paper

As indicated on the course schedule, you should have an outline and your topic ready for class on Tuesday.

As I indicated before we began reading the novel, your topic should be one of the 6-7 themes that we discussed in class. If you wish, you can address two themes, but they should be closely related. Your paper will address this theme, explaining how Vonnegut explores it throughout the novel—with a particular focus on how he uses different literary elements to emphasize this theme.

Your outline should be thorough, not a slapdash job. I will take it up on Tuesday and grade it, returning it on Thursday. By thorough, I mean that you should list the major topics of each of your sections, but you should also indicate specific passages or events that support your interpretation of the theme. For example, let’s say you are doing Romeo and Juliet, and the theme you wanted to address is the brevity of life, it might look like:

  1. Slaughterhouse Five: Intro
  2. Body: elaboration of “brevity of life.”
  3. Foreshadowing
  4. Discussion of Romeo and Juliet’s young age
  5. Discussion of other individual’s premature deaths
  6. Hints of Romeo and Juliet’s early death
  7. Symbols
  8. Candles
  9. Roses—and their brief life
  10. Narrative Structure
  11. Regular conflict and deaths between the two families
  12. Conclusion

That would be a good start, but it isn’t what you would want to turn in to me on Tuesday. First, you would want to flesh out parts b and c of the outline, bulking up the “symbols” and “narrative structure” sections. Second, you would not much more specificity. For example, under “foreshadowing,” you would want to include the specific passages that support the three examples of foreshadowing. In fact, you would want to type them in and cite them, just as you will do in your paper. You would do the same with the “Symbols,” citing the specific page numbers and typing in the passages that correspond to roses symbolizing a brief but beautiful life.

Research

In your drafts and, of course, your final copy, you will need at least five scholarly sources. Internet sources, encyclopedias, or magazines are not scholarly sources.

To find scholarly sources, you can access a variety of literary journals through the SHSU library.

1)Go to

2)Click on library

3)Click on “Resources” and “Databases and Indexes.”

4)Click on “Arts and Humanities.”

5)Many of the links on that page will be useful, and you should search each of them. I started with Contemporary Literary Criticism, and thirteen different sources came up.

You should read any of the works that you think will be useful to your topic. Do not search a few of them, get discouraged, quit, and then tell me you couldn’t find anything.

You may have to read through many of them before you come to one that will be helpful for your research.