Reading Prose and Drama: Voice, Plot, Style

This is Unit Two of American Literature, part one of two: the vocabulary for reading prose and drama, which is the rest of what this exam prints. Unit one closed on a method for poems, and the same governing idea runs through this unit, which part two pays off: every answer should be traceable to something on the page. What changes is the machinery. A poem is built from lines and a story is built from a teller, so the first question about any prose passage is who is speaking and what that position cannot see. From there we take how a story is built, the plot and the opposition and the people and the ground they stand on. Then how it is written, the sentence and the register and the difference between what a work is about and what it says about that. Then the techniques that break chronology or open a mind. And last the kinds: the genres, the American nonfiction forms that argue while they narrate, the vocabulary of the stage, and three words the exam uses as modes and as periods at once. By the end you will be able to name a narrator's type and what it hides. To take apart a plot, a conflict, a character and a setting. To describe a style and its register and separate theme from subject. To recognize broken chronology, frames and the modernist mind techniques. And to name the genres, the nonfiction forms, the stage vocabulary and the three modes.

Four entries on the teller: what the board asks of a prose passage, the three narrative positions, the narrator you cannot trust, and what any position conceals.

Three questions, all answerable from the page.

AML 0101 What the Exam Asks You to Do With a Prose Passage

The board prints an excerpt of fiction or nonfiction and asks three kinds of question about it: what form the passage takes, what theme it argues, and where it came from. The passage is always complete enough to answer from, which matters more than it sounds. Answer from the excerpt in front of you, and never from the book you think it was cut out of, because the questions are set on the printed lines.

The pronouns name the position.

AML 0102 Narration: First Person, Third Limited, Omniscient

A first-person narrator says I and knows only what that one character can know. A third-person limited narrator follows a single character's mind from outside. An omniscient narrator moves between minds and across time at will. The choice decides what a reader is allowed to learn and at what moment, which makes it a plot device and not only a grammatical fact. The pronouns identify the type within a sentence or two.

The details testify against the teller.

AML 0103 The Unreliable Narrator

An unreliable narrator reports events that the reader comes to doubt, whether from madness, from youth, from self-interest or from self-deception. The signal is a gap between what the narrator says and what the details of the account show. Poe's murderers are the American type, insisting on their own sanity in the same breath as they describe the crime. Unreliability is always shown and never announced.

Ask what the position cannot see.

AML 0104 Point of View and What It Hides

Point of view is not only the question of who speaks. It is also the question of what that position cannot see. A limited narrator hides other characters' motives because the chosen character cannot know them. An omniscient narrator can hide by choosing silence. Exam questions often turn on information that the viewpoint withholds rather than on anything it supplies, so withheld information is a technique and not an oversight.

Five entries on construction: the shape of a plot, the opposition driving it, the people it happens to, and the place it happens in.

Set up, complicate, turn, settle.

AML 0105 Plot: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Denouement

Exposition establishes the situation and the characters. Rising action complicates that situation. The climax is the moment of highest tension and decisive change. The falling action and the denouement settle what follows from it. This pattern describes most fiction and very nearly all drama, and the exam uses its vocabulary directly rather than paraphrasing. The climax is the turn in the action, which is not always the loudest event in the story.

Opposition is what a story runs on.

AML 0106 Conflict: Internal, External, and the Antagonist

Conflict is the opposition a story runs on. External conflict sets a character against another person, against nature, or against society. Internal conflict sets a character against themself. The antagonist is whoever or whatever opposes the protagonist, and it does not have to be a person at all. In American fiction the antagonist is very often a society rather than an individual, which is worth expecting before you look for a villain.

Depth and change are separate questions.

AML 0107 Character: Flat, Round, Static, Dynamic

A flat character is built from one or two traits. A round character has the contradictions of an actual person. A static character ends where they began, and a dynamic character changes over the course of the work. The two pairs are independent of each other, so a round character can be entirely static and a flat one can change. The exam tests that independence directly.

Told outright, or shown five ways.

AML 0108 Characterization: Direct and Indirect

Direct characterization tells a reader what a character is like. Indirect characterization shows it instead, through speech, through appearance, through action, through thought, and through the reactions of other characters. Realist writers strongly favour the indirect kind. Questions about what a character is like are usually answered from what the character does, because action outranks anything a narrator asserts.

Where and when, and what they permit.

AML 0109 Setting as Place, Time, and Pressure

Setting is where and when a work happens, and in American fiction it does more than locate. The frontier, the small town, the plantation and the city tenement each carry their own set of pressures on the people inside them. A question asking about the significance of a setting is asking what that place makes possible and what it forbids. In regional writing the setting is an argument.

Four entries on the writing itself: the sentence as a signature, the level it keeps, the claim the work makes, and what it repeats.

The sentence is the signature.

AML 0110 Style: Sentence, Rhythm, and the Writer's Hand

Style is the sum of a writer's choices at the level of the sentence: its length, its rhythm, its vocabulary, its punctuation, how much gets said and how much is held back. Style is how a reader identifies an author with no name attached to the page, and the exam asks that question directly. Style is measured in sentences rather than in subjects, so two writers on one subject are still two styles.

Four levels, and a shift between them.

AML 0111 Diction and Register in Prose

Register is the level a prose keeps: formal, neutral, colloquial, or vernacular. American fiction is the literature that made the vernacular literary, and a passage written in dialect places its speaker in a region and in a class at the same time. A shift of register inside a passage marks the arrival of a different voice. Dialect on the page is a writer's choice, not a transcript of speech.

A noun is not a sentence.

AML 0112 Theme Is Not Subject, and Not Moral

The subject is what a work is about; the theme is what the work says about that subject. Slavery is a subject. The claim that slavery corrupts the people who hold slaves is a theme. That distinction is the whole of the difference, and it is testable: a theme is a full sentence, and a best-describes question is asking for one. A moral advises a reader, where a theme makes a claim about the world.

Notice the second appearance.

AML 0113 Motif, Leitmotif, and Repetition

A motif is an image, a phrase or a situation that recurs through a work and accumulates meaning as it goes. Repetition signals importance without ever stating it, which is why a reader who notices a detail coming back a second time has usually found what the question is about. A motif builds its meaning through recurrence, where a symbol carries meaning from the start.

Four entries on time and mind: chronology broken deliberately, stories set inside stories, and two ways of putting thought on a page.

Broken order, to control knowledge.

AML 0114 Foreshadowing, Flashback, In Medias Res

Foreshadowing plants a hint of what is to come. Flashback interrupts the present to show the past. Beginning in medias res drops a reader into the middle of the action and supplies the beginning afterwards. All three break chronology, and all three do it for the same reason: to control what a reader knows and at what point. Broken chronology is about knowledge rather than about time.

An outer teller, an inner tale.

AML 0115 Frame Narrative and the Tale Within a Tale

A frame narrative encloses one story inside another, so that a character in the outer story is the one telling the inner one. The frame supplies a listener, a reason for the telling, and a distance the author can put to use. American regional writers used the device constantly as a way of introducing a dialect speaker. Ask why a frame exists, because it is never decoration.

Thought with the seams left showing.

AML 0116 Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue

Stream of consciousness renders thought as it actually runs, with its leaps and its fragments and its associations left in rather than tidied. Interior monologue is the more ordered relative of it, a character thinking in complete sentences. Both belong to modernist fiction, and Faulkner's chapters are the American case the exam names. The disorder on the page is composed, not transcribed.

One sentence, two owners.

AML 0117 Free Indirect Discourse

Free indirect discourse lets a third-person narrator borrow a character's words and attitude without any quotation marks, so that the sentence belongs to both of them at once. The technique is how a narrator can be ironic about a character while appearing to speak on that character's behalf. Irony very often hides inside this construction, which is why it rewards a second reading.

Eight entries on kinds: writing that mocks, writing that stands for something, the genres, the nonfiction forms, the stage, and three modes.

Attack, imitate, or mismatch.

AML 0118 Satire, Parody, Burlesque

Satire attacks a folly or a vice through ridicule, and it aims at reform. Parody imitates one particular work or style closely enough to expose it. Burlesque treats a serious subject frivolously or a trivial one grandly, and the mismatch is the method. The board names all three of these as options inside a single sample question. Parody needs a target text, where satire needs only a target.

A moral, a lesson, or a whole second meaning.

AML 0119 The Fable, the Allegory, the Parable

A fable is a short tale, often using animals, that ends in a stated moral. A parable is a short tale illustrating a spiritual or an ethical point. An allegory runs a second meaning the entire length of a work, with its characters and its events standing for ideas or for persons. Allegory is recognized by its personified abstractions, which is the fastest test available on an exam.

One sitting, one line, or many.

AML 0120 Genres the Exam Names: Novel, Novella, Short Story

A short story is read at one sitting and turns on a single effect. A novella runs longer and follows one line of action. A novel runs several lines at once. The romance, in the sense Hawthorne used the word, claims a latitude to depart from the probable that the novel does not claim. Romance in that sense is an argument about latitude and not a statement about love.

Four forms that argue while narrating.

AML 0121 Autobiography, Memoir, Slave Narrative, Captivity Narrative

Autobiography tells a whole life and memoir takes one part of a life. The captivity narrative recounts a seizure and a return. The slave narrative recounts bondage, escape, and the making of a free self. The last two are the distinctively American forms on this list, and both of them carry an argument inside the story rather than alongside it, which is exactly what the board's fourth sample question turns on.

An attempt, and an application.

AML 0122 The Essay and the Sermon as Literary Forms

The essay is a prose attempt on a subject, personal in the line that runs from Montaigne and argumentative in the public line. The sermon takes a scriptural text and applies it to a congregation, and in Puritan New England it was the dominant literary form of the culture. The exam treats both as literature, though its own fact sheet says it deals with them to a lesser degree.

The stage has its own vocabulary.

AML 0123 Drama: Act, Scene, Stage Direction, Soliloquy

A play divides into acts and those divide into scenes. Stage directions carry what is seen rather than what is said. A soliloquy is a character alone on stage, thinking aloud to the audience. An aside is a remark the other characters do not hear. Dialogue does the work that narration does in fiction, and the stage directions are part of the text rather than a note attached to it.

Downfall, or reconciliation.

AML 0124 Tragedy, Comedy, and the Tragic Flaw

Tragedy follows a serious action to an unhappy end, traditionally through a flaw in a figure of some stature. Comedy moves toward reconciliation and usually toward a marriage. American drama's chief argument, which Arthur Miller made in print as well as on the stage, is whether a travelling salesman can be a tragic figure. The American question is who may be tragic at all.

Three words doing double duty.

AML 0125 Realism, Naturalism, Romance: Three Modes, Not Three Periods

Realism represents ordinary life as it is actually lived. Naturalism adds a thesis to that, the claim that heredity and environment decide a life. Romance departs from the probable in pursuit of a truth of the heart. Each of these three names a period in American literature and also names a mode that a writer may choose in any period at all. They are modes first and periods second.

That is the vocabulary. Part two turns it into procedures you can run on a passage you have never seen. You can name a narrator as first person, third limited or omniscient from the pronouns, spot the gap that marks an unreliable one, and ask what the chosen position is unable to see. You can take a plot apart into exposition, rising action, climax and denouement, find the conflict driving it, sort characters on the two independent axes of depth and change, and read a setting as a set of pressures rather than a backdrop. You can describe a style at the level of the sentence, name the register, and keep theme, which is a sentence, apart from subject, which is a noun. You can recognize a flashback, a frame, a stream of consciousness and the borrowed voice of free indirect discourse. And you can name satire against parody, fable against allegory, novel against novella, the four American life-writing forms, the stage vocabulary, the two ancient dramatic kinds, and the three words that are modes before they are periods.