Sudden Death Fiction Essay Exam

Sudden Death Fiction Essay Exam

For this essay, you will write about two of the three short stories we have read that center on a sudden death, its contributing circumstances and its consequences. I give you the essay topic in advance because you will not have the short stories in front of you as you write. When writing about novels, you can describe specific scenes as evidence, but short stories provide fewer scenes and it thus requires more ingenuity to produce the concrete evidence necessary to prove your points. In preparation for this essay, I expect you to plan out what you will write before you arrive at class, including such details as what your thesis will be, what your topic sentences will be, what literary devices you will use to analyze the texts, what concrete evidence you will use to demonstrate these literary devices, and what similarities and differences you will identify between the two texts. I would even advise that you practice writing the essay at home on the theory that when we write things down, the things we write tend to sink into our heads and stay there.

Your goal in this essay is to provide a thoughtful examination of how two sudden death short stories work – how they function, operate, and do what they do. To achieve this goal, you must developan argument that reflects the techniques each author usesto develop the unique themes that his/her sudden death fiction emphasizes. Imagine you are a short story writer. You know that the story will center on a sudden death, but the power of this sudden loss of human life comes from the development of the story. If you were to merely read the last few paragraphs of each of these stories, they would be unlikely to move you in the way that they do after the pages of narrative development that each story offers. The author’s goal is to decide the best way to set up the story so that this sudden death will have an impact on the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of the reader, and your goal as interpreter is to explain the author’s choices.

The sudden death fictions we have read are O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Atwood’s “Death by Landscape,” and Dubus’s “The Intruder.” Each of the authors we have read uses fiction techniques such as direct and indirect characterization, internal and external conflict, symbolism and foreshadowing to advance the story. Your job is to develop an argument that analyzes the literary devices each author uses to portray this sudden death and its related themes that can range from motive/intention/ accident/calculated murder/voluntary harm/culpability/blame/guilt/shame/ embarrassment to selfishness/impropriety/desperation/rudeness to courageousness/ recklessness/carelessness to depression/unhappiness/dissatisfaction to innocence/

childishness/naivete/imagination to maturity/adult vice/sexual awakening.