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Reading a Story for Its Elements
Literature: Craft & Voice
Chapter 1
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
“Your job as a writer of fiction is
not to present an ideal world
but to try to present the world
that you see and hear around
you.”
— John Updike
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Craft
• A writer creates a story out of material he or she
has observed in the world and from incidents or
feelings or moods in his or her own life.
• But the result will not hold up well if the writer
lacks a firm grasp of craft. Craft is conscious
artistry.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Quotations on Writing
• “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other
people." – Thomas Mann
• "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what
they are." – W. Somerset Maugham
• "There is no great writing, only great rewriting." – Justice Louis Brandeis
• "I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it
shorter." – Blaise Pascal
• “All writing is rewriting.” – Ernest Hemingway
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Craft
• As a noun, craft refers to the elements that comprise a story.
• As a verb, craft refers to the process of making or fashioning a story out of
those elements.
Authors work hard to develop their craft. Writing
seldom comes easily even to professional writers.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Elements of Fiction
Craft involves the author’s use of the following major elements of fiction:
• Plot – the artful arrangement of incidents in a story.
• Character – the depiction of human beings (and non-humans) within a
story.
• Setting – the time and place of the story.
• Point of View – the perspective from which the story is told.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Elements of Fiction
• Tone – the implied attitude of the author toward the subject and
characters of a work.
• Style – the characteristic way in which a writer uses language,
tone, and other literary devices and elements.
• Symbol – the events and objects in a story that transcend literal
interpretation.
• Theme – the central ideas of the literary work, its underlying
meanings.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Types of Short Fiction
• Parables – stories that teach lessons through an implied moral,
usually of a religious or spiritual nature. Jesus taught in
parables.
• Fables – brief stories that explicitly state their moral, and
frequently feature animals as characters to satirize failings of
human nature or character. Aesop’s fables have endured for over
2500 years.
• Tales – narrate strange or fabulous happenings in a direct and
swift manner, without detailed characterization and usually
without intent to instruct.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Types of Short Fiction
• Modern Short Story – The modern short story
developed in the nineteenth century,
– presented detailed representations of everyday life,
– included more elaborate and dramatic scenes with generally more
dialogue,
– and was more concerned with revelation of character.
– Poe, Hawthorne, and Chekhov are important early practitioners.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
“A & P”
In walks these three
girls in nothing but
bathing suits….
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Discussion Questions
• How does “A & P” function as a historical
document? Consider how the narrator performs
his job as cashier, the dress code, the items for
sale, the A & P itself, and the Cold War backdrop.
• How is Sammy’s predicament very human? Is he
a convincing nineteen-year old?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Sammy
Consider…
•Is Sammy’s action heroic?
•Whether heroic or not, is his action offensive or
belittling to women?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Discussion Questions
• Is Sammy full of teenage angst? Does he have an
attitude?
• Is he a rebel without a cause?
• When Sammy quits in protest over their needless
humiliation, does he act from mostly pure motives or
does he want to impress the girls?
• Is it this sincere sympathy that leads Sammy to quit in
spontaneous protest?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Discussion Questions
• Is Sammy sexist? Certainly, he sees the girls as sex objects, and
he does dehumanize them, even after he says he feels sorry for
them.
• Do the girls need Sammy’s defense? Would they be able to handle
such a situation on their own, if men would let them?
• Is Sammy really a rebel or is he just embracing the values of a
male-dominated culture when he defends the girls?
• Would Sammy have quit if Lengel had reprimanded three males
for shopping shirtless and shoeless?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
“Story of an Hour”
Inspiration
Kate Chopin’s father died in a workrelated accident when she was very
young. The event may have inspired
“The Story of an Hour.”
Point of View
Chopin presents the story in the third
person, but the narrative voice looks
most often, but not exclusively, into the
consciousness of Louise Mallard.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Questions to Consider
• Consider how this perspective influences the theme of the
story.
• By looking into primarily Mrs. Mallard’s thoughts, does
the story become a kind of feminist text?
• One that concerns itself with the opportunities available
for women in the late nineteenth century? (Remember,
this story was written some twenty-five years before
women were allowed to vote.)
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
The Mallards’ Marriage
If one were to ask Mr. Mallard if he and his wife were
happily married, how do you think each would reply?
Mr. Mallard and the couple’s friends and family believe the
marriage to be happy. But Mrs. Mallard is decidedly
unhappy. The day before the story takes place she “had
thought with a shudder that life may be long.”
What accounts for the discrepancy between what Mrs.
Mallard feels and what everyone else perceives about
the marriage?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
The Mallards’ Marriage
Mr. Mallard is a decent man. Mrs. Mallard thinks of his “kind,
tender hands” and his “face that had never looked save with love
upon her,” and wonders, however briefly, about her “monstrous
joy.”
She had a comfortable home and he cared for her. The marriage had
all the trappings of what the culture would consider a happy
marriage.
What is lacking is the opportunity for Mrs. Mallard’s self-fulfillment.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Louise Mallard’s Epiphany
As with many stories, “The Story of an Hour” builds to the protagonist’s epiphany,
or moment of sudden realization.
Read closely the passages leading to Mrs. Mallard’s epiphany, which is inspired by
the “new spring life” outside her window. Note how the sounds, sights, and
scents of spring arouse Mrs. Mallard’s senses and how “her bosom rose and fell
tumultuously.”
She then realizes that with her husband’s death her life is her own and that she will
have “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely,”
and that she was now “Free! Body and soul free!” She felt the “very elixir of
life through that open window.”
Her joy was short-lived, however. When her presumably dead husband arrives
home, Louise dies from a heart attack.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Discussion Questions
The first sentence says that she has “heart
trouble”? Is this trouble only physical?
The final sentence reads, “When the doctors came
they said she had died of heart disease – of joy
that kills.” What is ironic about this conclusion?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
“An Ounce of Cure”
In “An Ounce of Cure,” Alice Munro presents a defining
moment in her narrator’s life.
“When I say I was expecting
extravagant results, I do not
mean that I was expecting
this….”
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Point of View
It is clear to the reader from the consistent use of past tense, the level of vocabulary, and
the mention of key events (first dance, college) that the narrator is looking back to her
somewhat distant past.
As a result, the narrator can tell her story
with playfulness, self-deprecation,
detachment, and even fondness.
Although the incident caused her genuine pain at the time, she has long since come to
terms with it.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Tone
Consider how the narrator reports the devastating aftermath of her
evening at the Berrymans.
She was ostracized but uses humorous metaphors to downplay her
pain. She reports rumors playfully rather than bitterly.
Her final sentence reveals that she has even had the last laugh over
Martin Collingwood.
Throughout the story, the narrator keeps the tone light and playful,
never letting the painful parts of the experience dominate.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
The Narrator
The narrator seems to be a somewhat typical teenage girl who, after being spurned
by her boyfriend, takes drastic actions to dramatize her crisis. She enjoys her
“self-inflicted misery,” the self pity, and the attention it brings her from friends
like Joyce.
The breakup makes the narrator feel older, more mature, as if she has now
experienced a depth of suffering that links her with tragic film or stage
heroines. Before her greatest scene, she describes the uncluttered space in the
Berryman home to be like a “stage.”
Consider her melodramatic actions leading up to her drunkenness: she plays a sad
record, sits in the dark, notices the street light, the partially drawn curtains,
and gives up her “soul for dead.”
Do you sympathize and empathize with the narrator? Are you reminded of a
moment of folly in your own life?
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
Significance of the Events
The story is significant to the narrator for several reasons:
1. The episode is one of those revealing and embarrassing moments
in teenage life when we are forced to confront how
unsophisticated and how self-absorbed we are, or, put another
way, when reality intrudes upon our delusions of self.
2. On another level, the incident may have brought the narrator
closer to her mother, who, in a crowded household, might not
have always been as watchful over her daughter as she might
have – consider the narrator’s confession about the aspirin,
“which was a mistake.”
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1
For Further Consideration
1. Short stories often focus on a defining moment in a character’s
life. Explain what the protagonists of “A & P,” “The Story of an
Hour,” and “An Ounce of Cure” come to realize about themselves
and their cultures?
2. How does setting function in each of these stories to reveal
character?
3. Rewrite a portion of one of the stories from a different point of
view. For “A & P,” you may write from Sammy’s perspective
twenty years after the event; for “The Story of an Hour,”
Josephine’s perspective, and for “Ounce of Cure,” the narrator’s
perspective only days after her experience.
Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 1