The following questions are there to help you make a profound analysis of any novel. It is of course not necessary to use all the questions in any one text. Remember to not just answer the questions, but write a coherent, interesting analysis with an introduction, body and conclusion.
Plot
What is the text about?
What is the conflict/problem in the text?
When do the events take place?
Is the text related in chronological order?
What important episodes are there?
Setting
Do the setting seem realistic?
Are the settings described with many or few details?
What is the atmosphere like? Is it sad? Ironic? Depressing? Happy? Upsetting?
Gloomy? Mystic? Give examples.
Characters
Who are the main characters?
What is the relationship between the characters?
What does the narrator emphasize: people’s looks and clothing? Their behaviour? Moral features? Personality?
Give examples from the book to support your arguments.
Other questions
Where is the turning point of the story?
What can be said about the gender perspective?
What can be said about the pace of the text: is it fast? Calm? Slow? Intense?
What can be said about the vocabulary? Dialect? Slang or jargon? Technical words? Are there many verbs = lots of action, or many nouns = mostly descriptions?
What is the author’s intentions?: to influence? Entertain? Confess? Appeal? Inform? Scare?
Have you been influenced in any way by the text?
Have you experienced any of the feelings expressed in the text?
What in the text appeals to you: the characters? The settings? The plot? The language?
Do you recognize any of the problems or conflicts in the text from your own experience?
What are the feelings towards the main character(s)?
What to think about when talking about the characters and the plot.
- Use the present tense.
YES: In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the townspeople visit Emily Grierson’s house because it smells bad.
NO: In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the townspeople visited Emily Grierson’s house because it smelled bad.
- In a formal analysis you should keep yourself out of the analysis, in other words – use the third person (no I or you). However, some instructors may require or allow the first or second person in an informal analysis.
FIRST PERSON: I believe that the narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” is a dynamic character because I read many details about the changes in his attitude.
THIRD PERSON: The narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” is a dynamic character who changes his attitude.
SECOND PERSON: At the end of “Everyday Use,” Mama realizes that Maggie is like her but has not received the attention you should give your daughter to help her attain self-esteem.
THIRD PERSON: At the end of “Everyday Use,” Mama realizes that Maggie is like her but has not received enough attention to build self-esteem.
- Use literary terms to discuss your points, see separate list.
- Do not confuse characters’ or speakers’ viewpoints with authors’ viewpoints.
- Support your points with many quotations and paraphrases, but write the majority of your paper in your own words with your own ideas.
- Avoid summarizing the plot or retelling the story literally. Explain the context briefly and implement your analytical view.
- Use linking words and transition sentences that guide the listener from one point to the next in your analysis.
Literary terms
To be able to write in a more formal English you could use some of the literary terms below.
- Protagonist Major character at the centre of the story.
- Antagonist A character or force that opposes the protagonist.
- Plot The arrangement of ideas and incidents that make up a story.
- Exposition Background information regarding the setting, characters, plot.
- Crisis Turning point; moment of great tension that fixes the action.
- Suspense A sense of worry established by the author.
- Conflict Struggle between opposing forces.
- Resolution The way the story turns out.
- Structure The design or form of the completed action. Often provides clues to character and action. Can even philosophically mirror the author’s intentions, especially if it is unusual.
- Setting The place or location of the action, the setting provides the historical and cultural context for characters. It often can symbolize the emotional state of characters.
- Language and Style Style is the verbal identity of a writer, oftentimes based on the author’s use of diction (word choice) and syntax (the order of words in a sentence). A writer’s use of language reveals the tone, or the attitude toward the subject matter.
Point of view can sometimes indirectly establish the author’s intentions.
- Narrator The person telling the story.
- First-person Narrator participates in action but sometimes has limited knowledge/vision.
- Objective Narrator is unnamed/unidentified (a detached observer). Does not assume character’s perspective and is not a character in the story. The narrator reports on events and lets the reader supply the meaning.
- Omniscient All-knowing narrator (multiple perspectives). The narrator takes us into the character and can evaluate a character for the reader (editorial omniscience). When a narrator allows the reader to make his or her own judgments from the action of the characters themselves, it is called neutral omniscience.
Assessment Matrix for novel presentation in English 6
| F | E | C | A | |
| Content and analysis. | Your presentation is too short to be assessed.
You don’t follow the instructions.
|
Your presentation is quite short, but OK.
You show that you have understood the plot and the content of the novel, but you miss many parts of the analysis. |
Your analysis deals with different perspectives in the novel, but they could be more developed.
You comment the characters and setting of the novel and try to convey the message of the novel.
|
Your analysis is well developed and shows the different perspectives of the novel.
You reflect on and analyse the characters and setting of the novel by giving examples from the novel.
|
| Fluency | You read your analysis instead of speaking freely with keywords.
The lack in fluency makes the presentation hard to understand. |
Your presentation is rather fluent, but is sometimes interrupted.
|
Your analysis is very fluent. | Your speech is natural and engaging with an excellent fluency. |
| Pronunciation | Several words are mispronounced and there is a strong Swedish intonation | Some words are mispronounced and there is a slight Swedish intonation | Your pronunciation is good. | Your pronunciation very is good. |
| Grammar | Your presentation contains many serious grammar mistakes. | Your presentation has some grammar mistakes but not too serious. | Your grammar is good with few exceptions. | Your grammar is almost perfect. |
| Vocabulary | Your presentation has only a basic vocabulary and contains errors in the use of words. | Your presentation has a good vocabulary with few errors in the use of words.
|
Your presentation has a rather advanced vocabulary
|
Your presentation has a very advanced vocabulary that you use with great precision.
|
Example of a professional book review
Catching Fire: Suzanne Collins’ Hit Young-Adult Novels
By Lev Grossman Monday, Sep. 07, 2009
I used to tell my daughter stories about a family of mer-cats–kitties with fish tails–who lived in the East River and how they were persecuted by a mean purple octopus. I spent considerable time and effort coming up with nonviolent ways for the mer-cats to defeat the octopus at the end of each story. Finally one night I asked my daughter Lily, who was 4 at the time, how she thought the mer-cats should handle the problem. She chirpily replied that the mer-cats should find a sharp rock and then stab the octopus till it died. Ha, ha, ha! Kids.
If the time ever comes, Lily might do pretty well in the Hunger Games. As described by Suzanne Collins in her young-adult novel of the same name, the Hunger Games are an annual spectacle in which a group of children are forced by the government to fight one another to the death on TV. A sequel, Catching Fire (Scholastic; 400 pages), will be out on Sept. 1. The Hunger Games is a chilling, bloody and thoroughly horrifying book, a killer cocktail of Logan’s Run, Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, reality TV and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But it inspires in readers a kind of zeal I haven’t seen since the early days of Twilight. Stephen King is a major fan. So is Stephenie Meyer.
The Hunger Games is set in an unspecified future time when things have gone pretty spectacularly badly for humanity. The world, or the bit of it we can see, is dominated by a ruling caste who live in luxury in a city called the Capitol. The rest of us live like peasants in 12 districts that are strictly cordoned off from the Capitol and one another. Life in the districts sucks: it’s mostly hard labor–mining coal and farming and working in factories–in dismal conditions.
To make things even dismaler, once a year each district is required to give up two of its children, chosen by lottery, and enter them in the Hunger Games. The kids are dropped into an enormous arena strewn with traps and hazards, with a heap of weapons and supplies in the middle. The last child alive wins a lifetime of luxury and celebrity. The action is filmed and broadcast to the entire world.
We experience this ordeal through the eyes of Katniss, a resident of District 12, a harsh, cold region mostly given over to coal-mining. She is a passionate 16-year-old who hates the Capitol and is devoted to her family; she volunteers for the Games to take the place of her sister, whose name came up in the lottery. Katniss is a skilled hunter and sheer death with a bow and arrow. She doesn’t like to kill. But she doesn’t want to die either.
Whereas Katniss kills with finesse, Collins writes with raw power. After a life spent in freezing poverty, Katniss experiences pleasure–warmth, food, pretty clothes–with almost unbearable intensity, and that’s where Collins’ writing comes alive. (Not sex, though. The Hunger Games isn’t just chaste, like Twilight; it’s oddly non-erotic.) Likewise, Collins brings a cold, furious clarity to her accounts of physical violence. You might not think it would be possible, or desirable, for a young-adult writer to describe, slowly and in full focus, a teenage girl getting stung to death by a swarm of mutant hornets. It wasn’t, until Collins did it. But rather than being repellent, the violence is strangely hypnotic. It’s fairy-tale violence, Brothers Grimm violence–not a cheap thrill but a symbol of something deeper. (One of the paradoxes of the book is that it condemns the action in the arena while also inviting us to enjoy it, sting by sting. Despite ourselves, we do.)
Katniss survives the first novel, and the second finds her back in the arena, where she will try, in her words, to “show them that I’m more than just a piece in their Games.” The Hunger Games and Catching Fire expose children to exactly the kind of violence we usually shield them from. But that just goes to show how much adults forget about what it’s like to be a child. Kids are physical creatures, and they’re not stupid. They know all about violence and power and raw emotions. What’s really scary is when adults pretend that such things don’t exist.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1919156,00.html
Mr Smedjeback's English Class 