LIT 2020 FINAL STUDY GUIDE Edgar Allan Poe The Fall of the House of Usher First person limited point of view Hemmingway more description than action Dark gloomy gothic tone Autumn as a symbol of death A LOT of personification in this story Usher s sickness melancholy emo A valet of stealthy step thence conducted me in silence through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master Much that I encountered on the way contributed I know not how to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken While the objects around me while the carvings of the ceilings the sombre tapestries of the walls the ebon blackness of the floors and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode were but matters to which or to such as which I had been accustomed from my infancy while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up Nathaniel Hawthorne The Birthmark Third person omniscient can see into thoughts etc Herman Melville Bartleby the Scrivener A Story of Wall Street Husband wants wife to be perfect Crimson stain on the snow Emotion driven romanticism Read in iambic pentameter I would prefer not to Character of inaction Demonstration of free will First person limited Narrator and Bartleby are opposing characters No imagery except for office on Wall Street very bland Henry James The Real Thing Themes Real life vs art Investigating an ethical issue adultery and questioning its philosophical partner the nature of true love Fantasy and wish fulfillment Content to have paid the price for the memory Kate Chopin The Maid of Saint Phillipe Honest presentation of human personality Taken from historical context social structure gender roles etc Mary Ann main character portrayed as masculine Narrator s descriptions Strong buckskin trapping handsome boy carried a gun Mary Ann s clothing is significant of her being able to switch gender roles Prologue gives narrator s opinion on Mary Ann immediately The three men in the story represent Church Government and patriarch Mary Ann goes against all three and decides to live with the Cherokee Indians Anton Chekov The Lady with the Dog Dmitri and Ann love affair Moscow vs Sunny Russia Moscow represents the coldness of his life with his wife and how he longs for Ann Sunnier Russia which is warmer and more tourist friendly represents Ann who is exotic and loving Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper Dramatic Irony the narrator first describes the bedroom John has chosen for them she attributes the room s bizarre features the rings and things in the walls the nailed down furniture the bars on the windows and the torn wallpaper to the fact that it must have once been used as a nursery Symbolism The woman behind the wallpaper seems to be trapped just like the main character who is never named The wallpaper represents the structure of family medicine and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped Wallpaper is domestic Fyodor Dostoevsky The Grand Inquisitor Ivan telling Alyosha a story Frame Narrative More than one narrator Time of Spanish Inquisition Almost all of this story is told in dialogue Themes Religion vs Anti religion Human Nature Good vs evil choice wisdom Philosophy love of wisdom Joseph Conrad An Outpost of Progress 3rd person omniscient Characters Protagonist Kayer Carlier both end up turning on eachother to become antagonists Both dealing with internal and external struggles Antagonist Makola external struggles 19th century sub Saharan Africa Trading outpost What colonization does to human spirit makes humans evil vs makes humans Themes good Anti colonization Isolation The unknown Nature of Humanity Symbols Fog the unknown Sunlight Cross religion Forest density Conrad agrees with Hobb s idea that man is evil until put into civilization Civilization as an illusion Progress and civilization and all the virtues Society was calling to its accomplished child to come to be taken care of to be instructed to be judged to be condemned it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away so that justice could be done Ernest Hemingway The Snows of Kilimanjaro Kilimanjaro literally means The House of God Harry the central character is sloth like and a procrastinator Safari was supposed to bring him back to the virtues of hard work and struggle Irony exists in deaths The leopard died in a high clean well lighted place dies rotting and stinking on the plains sad and never got to complete what he wanted to in life Mountain symbolizes goodness and purity Story told in both flashbacks and real time Hyena represents death Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange human almost crying sound The woman heard it and stirred uneasily She did not wake In her dream she was at the house on Long Island and it was the night before her daughter s debut Somehow her father was there and he had been very rude Then the noise the hyena made was so loud she woke and for a moment she did not know where she was and she was very afraid James Joyce Araby Mature adult telling a story about his first crush Personification found within houses Themes Social structure Accents divide who is better in social standing because of country of origin Look for lots of imagery Young boy realizes that the world isn t always a nice place Gazing up into darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derived by vanity and my eyes burned with anguish and anger Wyndham Lewis The Death of the Ankou Symbols Maggots in cheese death Blindness darkness ambiguity Ludo s face in any case was blind To be lost outside is much the same as to be hidden in the dark within Themes There is no boundary between consciousness and reality Concrete outside world is made through mental images Ambiguous narrator could possibly be Ankou Perhaps I has put myself in position of Ankou Narrator not named to have every man character Paradox that everyone could be the death god Modernism that all humans screw things up not just one particular person Plot Theme The blinded figure has burst into my daydream so unexpectedly Foreshadowing alliteration imagery Virginia Woolf The Mark on the Wall Just a mark on the wall that ends up being a snail Getting past the superficial and going into our deeper meaning Different perspectives Seeing snail normal through smoke subjectivity Takes place during World War 2 1st