Due Monday

Practice open ended essay! You may type this essay and work on it longer than 40 minutes if you like. You man NOT use your books, and if you do, you kind of ruin the object of the lesson which is understanding how to write an open ended essay without the text. These essays are practice and will be graded on completion only, so there really should not be a temptation to use your books.

Prompt:

Often times in literature, a character will encounter something, someone, or some occurrence that seeks to deny his or her sense of identity. Select one such character from a short story we have read and analyze what challenges that character experiences to his or her identity and how this contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Some advice on analysis:

Try to follow this basic pattern in analysis:

 Identify a challenge to identify (provide a specific plot reference.)

 Analyze how this shows a challenge to identity. (You will obviously have to offer specifics about the character’s identity as well in order to explain how this is a challenge.)

 Explain why this challenge to identity is important to illuminating a meaning of the story or MOWAAW. (something along the spectrum of interpretation.)

To have a complete analysis, you will need to discuss either multiple challenges to identity and/or multiple reasons why these challenges are important to the story. Much like poetry and prose analysis, you will want many specific plot references (grouped if possible) to serve as your evidence.