Full title · Lord of the Flies

author · William Golding

type of work · Novel

genre · Allegory; adventure story; castaway fiction; loss-of-innocence fiction

language · English

time and place written · Early 1950s; Salisbury, England

date of first publication · 1954

publisher · Faber and Faber

narrator · The story is told by an anonymous third-person narrator who conveys the events of the novel without commenting on the action or intruding into the story.

point of view · The narrator speaks in the third person, primarily focusing on Ralph’s point of view but following Jack and Simon in certain episodes. The narrator is omniscient and gives us access to the characters’ inner thoughts.

tone · Dark; violent; pessimistic; tragic; unsparing

tense · Immediate past

setting (time) · Near future

setting (place) · A deserted tropical island

protagonist · Ralph

major conflict · Free from the rules that adult society formerly imposed on them, the boys marooned on the island struggle with the conflicting human instincts that exist within each of them—the instinct to work toward civilization and order and the instinct to descend into savagery, violence, and chaos.

rising action · The boys assemble on the beach. In the election for leader, Ralph defeats Jack, who is furious when he loses. As the boys explore the island, tension grows between Jack, who is interested only in hunting, and Ralph, who believes most of the boys’ efforts should go toward building shelters and maintaining a signal fire. When rumors surface that there is some sort of beast living on the island, the boys grow fearful, and the group begins to divide into two camps supporting Ralph and Jack, respectively. Ultimately, Jack forms a new tribe altogether, fully immersing himself in the savagery of the hunt.

climax · Simon encounters the Lord of the Flies in the forest glade and realizes that the beast is not a physical entity but rather something that exists within each boy on the island. When Simon tries to approach the other boys and convey this message to them, they fall on him and kill him savagely.

falling action · Virtually all the boys on the island abandon Jack and Piggy and descend further into savagery and chaos. When the other boys kill Piggy and destroy the conch shell, Ralph flees from Jack’s tribe and encounters the naval officer on the beach.

themes · Civilization vs. savagery; the loss of innocence; innate human evil

motifs · Biblical parallels; natural beauty; the bullying of the weak by the strong; the outward trappings of savagery (face paint, spears, totems, chants)

symbols · The conch shell; Piggy’s glasses; the signal fire; the beast; the Lord of the Flies; Ralph, Piggy, Jack, Simon, and Roger

full title · The Scarlet Letter

author · Nathaniel Hawthorne

type of work · Novel

genre · Symbolic; semi-allegorical; historical fiction; romance (in the sense that it rejects realism in favor of symbols and ideas)

language · English

time and place written · Salem and Concord, Massachusetts; late 1840s

date of first publication · 1850

publisher · Ticknor, Reed, and Fields

narrator · The narrator is an unnamed customhouse surveyor who writes some two hundred years after the events he describes took place. He has much in common with Hawthorne but should not be taken as a direct mouthpiece for the author’s opinions.

point of view · The narrator is omniscient, because he analyzes the characters and tells the story in a way that shows that he knows more about the characters than they know about themselves. Yet, he is also a subjective narrator, because he voices his own interpretations and opinions of things. He is clearly sympathetic to Hester and Dimmesdale.

tone · Varies—contemplative and somewhat bitter in the introduction; thoughtful, fairly straightforward, yet occasionally tinged with irony in the body of the narrative

tense · The narrator employs the past tense to recount events that happened some two hundred years before his time, but he occasionally uses the present tense when he addresses his audience.

setting (time) · Middle of the seventeenth century

setting (place) · Boston, Massachusetts

protagonist · Hester Prynne

major conflict · Her husband having inexplicably failed to join her in Boston following their emigration from Europe, Hester Prynne engages in an extramarital affair with Arthur Dimmesdale. When she gives birth to a child, Hester invokes the condemnation of her community—a condemnation they manifest by forcing her to wear a letter “A” for “adulteror”—as well as the vengeful wrath of her husband, who has appeared just in time to witness her public shaming.

rising action · Dimmesdale stands by in silence as Hester suffers for the “sin” he helped to commit, though his conscience plagues him and affects his health. Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, hides his true identity and, posing as a doctor to the ailing minister, tests his suspicions that Dimmesdale is the father of his wife’s child, effectively exacerbating Dimmesdale’s feelings of shame and thus reaping revenge.

climax · There are at least two points in The Scarlet Letter that could be identified as the book’s “climax.” The first is in Chapter XII, at the exact center of the book. As Dimmesdale watches a meteor trace a letter “A” in the sky, he confronts his role in Hester’s sin and realizes that he can no longer deny his deed and its consequences. The key characters confront one another when Hester and Pearl join Dimmesdale in an “electric chain” as he holds his vigil on the marketplace scaffold, the location of Hester’s original public shaming. Chillingworth appears in this scene as well. The other climactic scene occurs in Chapter XXIII, at the end of the book. Here, the characters’ secrets are publicly exposed and their fates sealed. Dimmesdale, Hester, and Chillingworth not only acknowledge their secrets to themselves and to each other; they push these revelations to such extremes that they all must leave the community in one way or another.

falling action · Depending on one’s interpretation of which scene constitutes the book’s “climax,” the falling action is either the course of events that follow Chapter XII or the final reports on Hester’s and Pearl’s lives after the deaths of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth.

themes · Sin, experience, and the human condition; the nature of evil; identity and society

motifs · Civilization versus the wilderness; night versus day; evocative names

symbols · The scarlet letter; the town scaffold; the meteor; Pearl; the rosebush next to the prison door

full title · Moby-Dick; or The Whale

author · Herman Melville

type of work · Novel

genre · Epic, adventure story, quest tale, allegory, tragedy

time and place written · Between 1850 and 1851, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and New York City

date of first publication · 1851

narrator · Ishmael, a junior member of the Pequod's crew, casts himself as the author, recounting the events of the voyage after he has acquired more experience and studied the whale extensively.

point of view · Ishmael narrates in a combination of first and third person, describing events as he saw them and providing his own thoughts. He presents the thoughts and feelings of the other characters only as an outside observer might infer them.

tone · Ironic, celebratory, philosophical, dramatic, hyperbolic

tense · Past

setting (time) · 1830s or 1840s

setting (place) · Aboard the whaling ship the Pequod, in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans

major conflict · Ahab dedicates his ship and crew to destroying Moby Dick, a white sperm whale, because he sees this whale as the living embodiment of all that is evil and malignant in the universe. By ignoring the physical dangers that this quest entails, setting himself against other men, and presuming to understand and fight evil on a cosmic scale, Ahab arrogantly defies the limitations imposed upon human beings.

rising action · Ahab announces his quest to the other sailors and nails the doubloon to the mast; the Pequod encounters various ships with news and stories about Moby Dick

climax · In Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” Ahab interrogates himself and his quest in front of Starbuck, and realizes that he does not have the will to turn aside from his purpose.

falling action · The death of Ahab and the destruction of the Pequod by Moby Dick; Ishmael, the only survivor of the Pequod's sinking, floats on a coffin and is rescued by another whaling ship, the Rachel.

themes · The limits of knowledge; the deceptiveness of fate; the exploitative nature of whaling

motifs · Whiteness; surfaces and depths

symbols · The Pequod symbolizes doom; Moby Dick, on an objective level, symbolizes humankind's inability to understand the world; Queequeg's coffin symbolizes both life and death

full title · “The Fall of the House of Usher”

author · Edgar Allan Poe

type of work · Short story

genre · Gothic short story

DATE OF PUBLICATION - 1839

narrator · We know little of his background, and we never even learn his name. He was childhood friends with Roderick Usher. He arrives on horseback at the house with the intention of helping Usher. Though he details precisely the nature of Usher's madness, it is suggested through the course of the narrative that he too may be losing his sanity. Indeed, given his terrified description of the ghastly house in the opening passages of the tale, the reader must wonder whether he was sane from the start.

point of view · Poe's first-person narrators produce unreliable confessions. They control the narrative, and we see only through their eyes.

tone · gloom and pessimistic

tense ·

protagonist · The tale establishs the first-person narrators as protagonists by focusing on their struggles with madness and the law.

major conflict Throughout the story, Usher is overwhelmed with a sense of his own impending demise: "I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive," he tells the Narrator, "when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." By entombing Madeline, he creates that very "grim phantasm" with which he will struggle to the death--his prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. Thus, just as the Narrator's reading of the "Mad Trist" seems to summon or conjure the strange noises from below, so does Usher essentially craft his own death. The vault in which he buries Madeline echoes the one he paints, another instance of otherworldly foresight; but if one considers the vault as less a grave than a place of birth, less a tomb than a womb, then Roderick puts Madeline inside in order to finally give her a new life. If he understood what he was doing, it would be a gesture of filial love. Madeline has become one of the "vegetable things" that Usher is convinced possess sentience. Or, perhaps, he unwittingly grants the power of sentience to her, like a would-be Frankenstein resurrecting his lost loved one.

rising action The story's narrator is summoned by his boyhood friend Roderick Usher to visit him during a period of emotional distress. The narrator discovers that Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also sick.

climax Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, takes a turn for the worse shortly after the narrator's arrival, and the men bury Madeline in a tomb within the house. They later discover, to their horror, that they have entombed her alive. Madeline claws her way out, collapsing eventually on Roderick, who dies in fear

falling action The last image the Narrator describes seeing is that of the House of Usher splitting apart along the previously noted zig-zag fissure. The walls are bursting and the fragments are swiftly disappearing into the "deep and dank tarn."

themes · Mortality, Madness, Fear, Friendship, Burial, The Arts

motifs · The concepts of the vault and of premature burial

symbols · Eyes, tomb

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1272