write on any of the short stories assigned up to this point. Your thesis must be an arguable statement: take a position on a point that reasonable, intelligent people, having read the story, could still disagree about. Your argument supporting this thesis must be based on clearly stated reasons, which you must show are grounded in the story by presenting brief quotes or specific details from the story as evidence to back them. Present all these features in a clearly organized, persuasive essay.
Here are some general suggestions to start your thought processes. They don’t supply you with a ready-made thesis, but help you develop one. Please note also that these hints aren’t intended to provide an outline for your essay.
1. Discuss what you take to be one important theme or idea in one of the stories. Use one or more of the basic elements of the short story, as described by Kennedy & Gioia, to find evidence for this theme. Do not try to cover every element; simply discuss one or two that seem especially productive for developing your argument.
2. Compare two stories that appear to be on a similar theme. Do the two writers handle specific elements of the story in ways that are mainly similar or different? What do the similarities (or differences) reveal about each writer’s development of this central theme?
3. Discuss any problem that the writer’s handling of one of the basic elements seems to raise in the story. (For example, in John Updike’s “A&P,” the plot reaches a climax when Sammy quits his job. He then realizes that the girls he is defending are already gone and will never know of his romantic gesture; does that knowledge make his action and the plot meaningless?).
4. Choose any theoretical approach or critical insight from the notes introducing the stories, from the commentary following them, or from the critical approaches to literature discussed in Literature, Chapter 48. Discuss that idea in relation to one or several of the story elements: plot, character, setting, point-of-view, voice/style, or theme. Don’t get bogged down, though, in explanations of these basic concepts.
