This assignment should help you to examine a piece of fiction in order to find pertinent meaning in the text. It should help you to see how fiction often uses characters, events, and symbols in works to convey meaning that while often unspoken, nonetheless pervades and informs the given text.
Using a short story from our assigned class readings, write an essay in which you "explain" your understanding of the story, a character in the tale, one prevailing symbol (or prevalent chain of symbols) in that particular text.
First, find a short story or part in the novel that sticks out to you for its imagery. Then examine this imagery for how it comments on the text. Think of how various authors “code” the different types of people in the text. Examine how authors depict the various characters in their stories. The people in these stories often embody what the text is trying to convey. Furthermore, what characters do and what they say form a commentary that you can examine as a coherent theme being portrayed in the story. Hence, by examining the representational elements of these characters in the story, you will find some fascinating commentary developing on what we may consider the main “theme” of the story. Finally, you can examine the use of symbols in the story. Sometimes a text will contain images and elements that represent objects beyond their literal meaning. These are often key in terms of explaining what's going on in the story, and you can use these symbols as part of the "language" you weave together in order to interpret your story. Your goal for this assignment is to uncover, interpret, and develop a pervasive theme in one story that informs some aspect of the text. If you can do this, you can have a successful essay.
Your essay should be typed, double-spaced, with one inch margins (top, bottom, right, left), 12 point standard font (Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, etc.). Length should be about four (4) pages. You will be expected to develop a thesis driven essay that focuses on one short story and explicates a theme in the text. You will be expected to make general statements that develop and explicate a pervasive theme in the story. Moreover, you need to support these statements in paragraph form throughout the body of the essay, citing textual examples when appropriate. I will be paying special attention to focus, development and structure (essay, paragraph, and particularly sentence). I will note grammar and spelling errors, and I will expect you to have improved on your editing skills from previous essays. Make sure that your essay is well focused and structured for this assignment. Proper MLA citation and documentation—including parenthetical citations in the text of the paper and a “Works Cited” page (which does NOT count as a page for your essay, by the way!)—is an absolute necessity for this paper.