CONTENTS

Part One Structure

Chapter 1 Plot

John Updike A & P

Graham Greene The Destructors

Chapter 2 Character

James Joyce Araby

Eudora Welty A Wom Path

Chapter 3 Setting and Atmosphere

Flannery O'Connor Everything That Rises Must

Converge

Doris Lessing The Old Chief Mshlanga

Chapter 4 Point of View

Frank O'Connor First Confession

John Cheever The Swimmer

Chapter 5 Theme

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr Harrison Bergeron

Richard Wilbur A Game of Catch

Chapter 6 Style, Tone and Mood

Nadine Gordimer The Train from Rhodesia

Tobias Wolff In the Garden of the North American

Martyrs

Chapter 7 Irony, Humor, Satire and Paradox

Shirley Jackson The Lottery

Bemard Malamud The Magic Barrel

Chapter 8 Symbol, Allegory, Fantasy and Absurdity

Ann Beattie Dwarf House

Donald Barthelme Some of Us Had Been Threatening

Our Friend Colby

Part Two Interpretation

Chapter 9 Moral-Philosophical Approach

Isaac Bashevis Singer Gimpel the Fool

Kay Boyle Astronomer's Wife

Chapter 10 Historical-Biographical Approach

Emest Hemingway Indian Camp

F Scott Fitzgerald Babylon Revisited

Chapter 11 Formalistic Approach

James Thurber The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Saki (H H Munro) The Open Window

Chapter 12 Psychological Approach

William Faulkner A Rose for Emily

E. B. White The Second Tree from the Comer

Chapter 13 Mythological-Archetypal Approach

John Steinbeck The Snake

Harlan Ellison Shatterday

Chapter 14 Sociological Approach

Kate Chopin The Story of an Hour

D. H. Lawrence The Rocking-Horse Winner

Chapter 15 Structural-Semiotic Approach

Emest Hemingway A Very Short Story

Langston Hughes On the Road

Chapter 16 Reader-Response Approach

Gary Gildner Sleepy Time Gal

Grace Paley A Conversation with My Father

Appendixes

1. Glossary of Literary and Critical Terms

2. Referential Answers to the Questions

Bibliography

Stories are based on life, but life as it is cannot be a story. For life

to become a story, it needs to be clipped and shaped, and that is

plotting. In "A & P" (present chapter) John Updike writes only

about those events that suggest a basic conflict between conformity and

independence, thus creating a plot by imposing order and unity on his

material. Plot is not merely the sum total of events or their sequence.

Rather it is the organizing principle that controls the order of events,

the selecting, ordering, and arranging of incidents to bring out their

importance, their relationship and their mutual dependence. To say

that some girls in bathing suits walk into an A & P and that Sammy

the clerk quits is to say only what happens. Actually the story has this

pattern: The A & P excludes nonconformity. Sammy admires the

nonconformity of Queenie and the other two girls who come into the

A & P in bathing suits. The three girls are rebuffed by Lengel the

manager. In protest Sammy decides to quit. To review a story s plot,

therefore, is to say something about the connections between the

events in the story. Because a well-plotted story presents such a

focused and controlled segment of life, reading it offers us an insightful

way of bringing order and meaning to our own life experiences.

The traditional plot follows with variations a basic design that

may be visualized as a line, which gradually rises, reaches a high

point, and then moves downward. Although this design may be varied,

it usually manifests certain elements basic to most fictional plots:

exposition, conflict, complication, crisis, climax and denouement.

Exposition refers to the opening portion of the story that sets the

scene, introduces the main characters, tells what happened before the

story opened, and provides any other background information that is

needed for the reader to understand and care about the events to

follow.

A good exposition never fails to contain the seed or suggestion of a

conflict, or a clash of actions, ideas, desires or wills that is intensified

and then resolved during the narrative. Whether the story is about an

attempt to get out of a punishment, about parents' frustrated efforts

to discipline a recalcitrant child, or about the difficult decision on the

choice of a career, at the heart of each lies a conflict. In fiction, as in

real life, the conflict may be physical, mental, emotional or moral,

and it may take three basic forms: man against man (some other

person or group of persons) , man against his environment ( nature,

society or fate), or man against himself (some element in his own

nature).

When the characters are caught up in their situation and the

conflict intensifies, the rising action begins, the complication occurs

and the crisis develops until the conflict peaks at a moment of climax,

the point of greatest intensity when the opposing forces interlock or

reach a standstill and the outcome is to be decided.