Lit 2020 Exam 1 Study Guide 1 essay minimum 2 paragraphs 10 multiple choice questions 13 fill in the blank Essay is on Shapeshifter Principle or CivilWarLand in bad decline Character A person animal object in a story Protagonist Main character Antagonist Person in conflict with protagonist Plot What happens in the story Setting When where the story takes place Conflict A problem that the characters in a story resolve man vs man man vs nature man vs himself Theme What the story is about Genre A category A Sound of Thunder By Ray Bradbury Characters Eckels Travis dinosaur Plot A rich man travels back in time to hunt a dinosaur and messes up the future by stepping on a butterfly Setting 2055 U S and the jungle of 60 million years ago Genre Science Fiction A Good Man is Hard to Find By Flannery O Connor Protagonist Grandmother Manipulative Opinionated Na ve Racist Vain Not good Bailey Dad boring bland wimp Mom boring bland described as an animal vegetable by grandmother baby machine nameless Kids Very annoying no respect Red Sammy veteran self described good man Misfit Killer veteran Plot graph Exposition Meet the family Rising Action Get in the car grandmother sneaks in cat Red Sammy s the house accident family is killed Climax Misfit kills grandmother Falling action short not really sure what they are talking about not really any resolution Chekov s gun Named for a playwright If a gun appears on stage in 1st act then it must go off by the end of the play 1st paragraph the grandmother mentions the misfit The Sun the Moon the Stars By Junot Diaz Yunior Sympathetic character Magdalena Girlfriend originally feel bad for her then you grow to hate her Setting Dominican Republic Campo where Yunior s grandfather lives vs Resort Theme goodness and identity Existential crisis Moment of despair no other option buy to be yourself When Yunior is put in the cave and all he thinks about is the first day her met Magda CivilWarLand in Bad Decline By George Saunders Narrator Passive yes man ineffectual nameless Mr A Greedy drunk weak Sam Insane PTSD The Mr Mrs and kids Old ornery Evelyn and kids Nagging wife beloved kids Tone of story Everything is matter of fact Parallelism between ghost family and narrator s family Everything relates back to money Archetype A stalk character ex greedy boss Narrator and the Mr chasing after family trapped in a cycle trapped in Civil War Land The Mr and Sam Veterans with PTSD murderers very hateful Narrator and Mr A Both are weak Banality of evil Repeating the worst part of the past the civil war when our own country fought against each other Good Country People By Flannery O Connor Names of characters are very important Mrs Hopewell Babies her daughter that is 32 Mrs Freeman Family works for Hopewell Joy Very negative all the time changes name to Hulga has a prosthetic leg Manley Pointer Penis joke takes weird things from girls Joy s fake leg Free indirect discourse O Connor focus on hearts and heart conditions people being violently confronted by the truth against academics loves symbols for example an empty Bible A Happy Death By Alison Bechdel Central mystery Attitude towards death Milk man Name is Mort death Fun eral home Existential theme Obelisk Compared to the Addams family The form mirrors the content The Shapesifter Principle By CJ Hauser Tina 18 irresponsible nerd has responsibilities of taking care of brother very proud of Joey Joey 14 blind athlete confident motivated sympathetic Daphne Absent pawned heirlooms Benny 22 coach love interest Themes Blindness and sight responsibility motherhood Setting Mid late 2000 s 3 TV shows that give time period away X Files Fringe Buffy the Vampire Slayer Told in 1st person by Tina Problem with shape shifters They can be anyone when you think you know someone they can change and be someone else A blind man can t be fooled by outer appearances Kids don t see their parents as people The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World By Gabriel Garcia Marquez Esteban Dead man that washed ashore Plot Ladies felt bad for him then uncovered his face and saw his beauty and fell in love Everyone from other towns adored Esteban as well When they put him back in the ocean they didn t anchor him so he could come back The village people changed their whole town because Esteban made them want to be better Written as a tale for children but there is a dead naked body Is Esteban actually a god No because he is dead Are the village people small No they compare Esteban to a horse Metaphor for Jesus People changed and became better for him People become better after someone dies Animal Gods By William Todd Seabrook Setting conflict characters and a theme but no plot Intentional fallacy One meaning to everything and the author is the key to understanding the story Surface conflict Thematic conflict The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman Genre anti enlightenment Gothic Contains autobiographical mystery and suspenseful elements Gothic Epistolary Horror Ghost Theme enlightenment vs reason John Husband Doctor stands for reason Jane PTSD from giving birth stands for romanticism unreliable narrator Weir Mitchell Doctor who dealt with psychotic patients Wallpaper Almost a character that Jane becomes spoken about very negatively compared to the real world and needs to be destroyed because it doesn t make sense Jennie Sister in law Jane s caretaker Hysteria To go crazy directed towards women Tropes Repeated pattern in literature All in gothic stories Creepy house Big ancestral mansion Bad weather Mental illness Twins The Fall of the House of Usher By Edgar Allan Poe Everything is described with sad words Usher s family is incestual Books read to Usher are all about journeys into Hell Archetype Gothic story creepy house mysterious illness twins supernatural Edgar Allan Poe The American Gothic writer Usher s twin sister is dying they think she is dead and put her in the cellar but she comes back to life and scares Usher to death Narrator runs out of the house and it falls Narrator and Usher were close childhood friends but he didn t even know he had a sister let alone a twin Usher has been confined to the house his whole life but was allowed out at sometime to meet the narrator mystery A lot of unanswered questions The Adventure of the Speckled Band By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Detective Holmes Solves cases because he likes to and to show that he is the most intelligent not for money or to help people God complex Watson Sidekick People are