Expert Analysis on "To Build A Fire"

Today will be spent completing the following items:
1. We will watch the very end of the movie (remember the link is still available to watch on your own time)
2. Work on finishing ALL of your study guide questions for "To Build a Fire" from last week (this is one of the last assignments of Q2 along with your presentation/analysis)
3. Work on your analysis/presentation for tomorrow---you will be responsible for presenting your annotations and information to the class
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Name: ___________________________________________________CLOSE READING FICTION WORKSHEET When close reading any literary text, narrative or fiction, the goal remains to make a claim for potential meanings locatable within a text based supported by analysis of the way the text is put together. At the heart of this is a kind of invention: taking the materials presented to you and explaining how they lead to ideas and insights that are not explicitly spelled out by the text itself. Training your eye to notice these “materials” in all their forms is the first step. It can be hard to know where to start, however, because sometimes writing about a novel or a longer text presents you with too much to analyze! This worksheet offers you some preliminary guidelines. Not every question will be productive, but the idea is to think (slowly, resourcefully, and inventively) about the features of a text on a micro- and macro-scale.

 1. After you’ve finished reading the full narrative once, pause and think about which moments/passages you remember as particularly striking, utterly confusing, or wonderful (hopefully, you’ve been marking passages all along while reading!). Try to recover the parts of the text that left the greatest impression on you—these parts generally make good fodder for analysis (especially if they were confusing!)

What section of the text are you analyzing: _____________________________________

2. Summarize what is happening in this moment in the text, and how this passage fits into what is happening– in just ONE OR TWO SENTENCES:

3. Read over the paragraph slowly, attending to its “poetic” features Describe the rhythm of the language. Is it hurried? Calm? What makes it so? Are there any similes/metaphors/personification involved? What are their tenors and vehicles? Are there any repeated words/ phrases/images within this passage?

 4. Read the paragraph over again, attending to the narrative and structural features: What perspective is the passage written from? (Is it 1st/2nd/3rd person?) Is the speaker – in this passage alone—presented as omniscient? Limited? Are any, pronouns are used? What is the setting of this moment in the text? What details are provided about the setting? How much time is passing at this moment in the text? How do you know time is passing? Characterize the kinds of events occurring in this moment—what kinds of actions are being taken (are they violent? Free? Forced?). If actions are not being taken, what kinds of experiences are being had? (Are characters emotional? Thoughtful? Emotional?) Characterize the relationships between the characters in this scene (are they communicating? Fighting? Awkward? Friendly? Intimate?)

5. Think more pointedly about the passage in relation to the text as a whole. Poetic Features Does a motif appear in the passage? Does an image or specific kind of imagery appear in this passage and elsewhere in the text? Which ones, and where else? How does the way this moment is written reflect or contradict the events being described? Does the “tone” or feeling of this moment match the content described? Narrative/ Structural Features Is the narrator behaving differently in this moment of the text than at other times? How? What seems to catalyze the narrator’s changes in behavior? How is setting of this passage reflective of the events happening or the ideas being discussed? Do the events occurring in this moment resemble events that occur elsewhere in the text?

6.Taking a more “macro” view, think about the general experience of reading the text AS A WHOLE: What are its biggest themes? What ideas does it wrestle with? What conflicts/ tensions/ relationships seem to be at its core? Look back at your inventory of observations. What do the patterns and disjunctions manifested in this passage (poetically, narratively, structurally) have to do with the broader themes/relationships preoccupying the text as a whole? (IN OTHER WORDS—HOW DOES YOUR SEGMENT OF THE TEXT RELATE TO THE TEXT AS A WHOLE OR WHY IS IT AN IMPORTANT PIECE?)