Comprehensive Study Guide: Fictional Prose and Performance Analysis

Fictional Prose Fundamentals

  • Definition of Fiction: Fiction originates entirely from a creator's imagination rather than from historical or actual events.
  • Categories of Fictional Stories:
    • Unrealistic Stories: Feature impossible characters or plots that actively break the laws of nature.
    • Characteristics include talking animals, flying carpets, human beings performing superhuman feats, and worlds inhabited by mythical creatures such as fairies and leprechauns.
    • Realistic Stories: Possess a distinct "might be" quality.
    • Characters closely resemble actual human beings.
    • Plots represent events that could realistically happen in everyday life.

Elements of Stories

Stories center on actors who respond to various conflicts and experience transformation as a result. The fundamental components consist of characters and plots.

Characters

  • Definition: Characters are the active agents in narratives. They can be real or fictional, human, animal, or personified objects.
  • Influences on Character Decisions: A character's personal traits directly motivate and shape their decisions. These traits include:
    • Beliefs and values
    • Energy level and temperament
    • Personal past and history
    • These factors dictate what characters say and do, how they react to others, and how others interact with them.
  • Character Examples:
    • David Sedaris's Father:
    • Described as a man who, under the right circumstances, might have invented the microwave oven or the transistor radio.
    • Not someone to seek out for advice on personal problems, but the exact person to call when a dishwasher breaks or someone flushes a hairpiece down the toilet.
    • His children held high faith in his technical ability but learned to steer clear while he was working, as the experience of watching was repeatedly ruined by an interminable explanation of how things were put together.
    • Seabiscuit (The Racehorse):
    • A three-year-old bay colt who sneered at trainer Smith by the track rail, swinging his head high with an arch expression as if asking, "Who the devil are you?"
    • Descendant of the famous Man o' War, though his stunted build possessed none of the beauty or breadth of his forebears.
    • His body was low to the ground with the physical properties of a cinder block, featuring a sad little tail barely long enough to brush his hocks.
    • Stubby legs displayed unsound construction with squarish, asymmetrical "baseball glove" knees that failed to straighten completely, leaving him in a permanent semicrouch.
    • His walk was an odd, straddle-legged motion frequently mistaken for lameness, and his gallop was so disorganized that he had a maddening habit of whacking his front ankle with his own hind hoof (compared to a duck waddle).
    • Despite throwing a fit in the starting gate and being left flat-footed at the bell, he won his race and exchanged a mutual nod of respect with trainer Smith. His true quality resided in his heart.
  • Character Consistency:
    • Audiences expect characters to act consistently with their established traits and background.
    • Acting outside these parameters is considered acting "out of character."
    • Logical behavior makes the overall story credible (e.g., expecting a horse with "heart" to overcome obstacles, or children to respect while avoiding an earnest father).

Plot Structure and Development

  • Definition: Plot represents the action and events of a story. It occurs as characters' values, assumptions, and behaviors are challenged, tracking their responses and subsequent life changes.
  • Chronological Stages of Plot:
    • 1. Setting: Introduces characters and places them in a specific time and location. Opens in an initial state of balance or status quo where characters cope adequately.
    • 2. The Challenge: The heroes or protagonists (agents/co-agents with whom the audience identifies) encounter opposition from antagonists or counteragents.
    • Character Antagonists: Example includes Indiana Jones (protagonist) seeking the lost Ark of the Covenant for positive reasons versus Hitler's agents (antagonists) seeking it for evil motives.
    • Force Antagonists: Can be economic, physical, natural, or social forces (e.g., the Great Depression, AIDS, a devastating flood, or religious persecution).
    • Inciting Incident: Triggers the conflict and disrupts the status quo (Illustrated in Figure 7.1).
    • 3. Rising Action: The core problem intensifies, building suspense as the audience wonders what actions the characters will take and how events will resolve (Illustrated in Figure 7.2).
    • 4. The Climax: The central conflict escalates to a point where an irrevocable event occurs. This serves as the turning point of the narrative and the point of no return, bringing the actor's true characteristics to the foreground and determining the final outcome (Illustrated in Figure 7.3).
    • 5. The Denouement: Story tension relaxes and balance is restored, though circumstances have fundamentally changed (e.g., altered political alliances, famous heroes, or new insights into personal strengths and weaknesses) (Illustrated in Figure 7.4).
  • Truth and Credibility in Narratives:
    • Listeners evaluate whether a scenario is reasonable and whether the conflict is realistic or possible.
    • Unrealistic stories, myths, and folktales (such as The Little Engine That Could) do not need to be literally true in every detail to communicate "a form of truth" regarding cultural beliefs or proper living.
    • While most plots progress chronologically from setting to denouement, some begin at the denouement and work backward through the events.

Analyzing the Narrator

The narrator is the entity telling the story. Analyzing the narrator's stance, point of view, and approach is critical for prose performance.

Narrator Involvement and Person

  • First-Person Narrators:
    • Major Characters: Participate directly in the actions recounted. They reveal their personality traits through what they choose to tell, language style, tone, and attitude toward events.
    • Example: The dog narrator in Peter Mayle's A Dog's Life, who explores his owners' forbidden antique bedspread and rearranges pillows into a circular nest while his owners are at lunch. Performance requires a confessional, nonchalant, and amused tone.
    • Minor Characters: Play minimal roles in the central action, focusing primarily on observing others and building impressions of surrounding characters rather than themselves.
    • Example: The young Southern girl in Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, who describes her Grandma Pettibone wearing a lucky blue and white polka-dotted dress, jeweled earrings, and bright purple hair (proven to be "bluish gray" by a box top) while playing 1717 bingo cards at once at the VFW hall with her friends Ollie Meeks and Pearl Tatum.
  • Second-Person Narrators:
    • Address the reader directly as "you," creating a personal, confidential involvement.
    • Common in Choose Your Own Adventure books and specific literary works (e.g., Sandra Cisneros's story about turning eleven years old while still carrying all previous ages underneath).
  • Third-Person Narrators:
    • Stand outside the action to observe characters.
    • Omniscient: Possesses complete knowledge of all characters' thoughts, feelings, and motivations.
    • Limited Omniscient: Possesses internal knowledge of only one or a few characters.
    • Objective: Reports events without revealing internal thoughts, feelings, or motivations.
    • Subjective: Emotionally involved in the narrative, explicitly revealing personal biases, likes, dislikes, hopes, and dreams.
    • Detached: Maintains a reportorial, neutral stance with minimal emotional involvement.

Narrator Characteristics, Tone, and Perspective

  • Demographics and Style: Performance requires identifying the narrator's gender, age, and language style (standard vs. nonstandard/colloquial, formal vs. conversational, serious vs. lighthearted, exaggerated vs. restrained).
  • Attitudes and Tone: The narrator's emotional orientation toward characters and events determines tone (e.g., sarcastic, amused, outraged, ironic, mournful, regretful, passionate, condescending, or disgusted).
  • Narrative Control and Credibility:
    • Narrators may actively control what is included or omitted to construct specific impressions.
    • Unintentional self-revelation may expose a narrator as compulsive or evil (e.g., the narrators in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Cask of Amontillado").
    • Assessment of credibility determines whether a narrator is trustworthy, lying, concealing, or slanting the truth.
  • Perspective Modification:
    • The chosen perspective dictates narrative hero and villain designations.
    • Traditional Perspective: The Biblical account of David and Goliath frames David as the hero who defeats the Philistine giant with a slingshot stone to the forehead and severs his head.
    • Alternate Perspective: Frederick Buechner's retelling from Goliath's viewpoint:
    • Goliath stood 10 feet10\,\text{feet} tall in stocking feet, wearing a size 2020 collar, a 912-inch9\frac{1}{2}\text{-inch} hat, and a 52-inch52\text{-inch} belt, weighing as much as a Sherman tank in full armor.
    • Characterized by leaden dark moods, elephantine light moods, an aversion to under-arm deodorants as effeminate, and finding explanation as difficult as pushing a truck uphill.
    • When hit by the stone, windows rattled as far away as Ashkelon; he perceived David as his own soul stripped of unwieldy flesh for its journey to Paradise, leaving an unmistakable smile on his severed head.
    • This perspective humanizes and personalizes the traditional villain into a sympathetic figure.

Intended Audience Analysis

  • Audience Mode: Analysis must identify how the narrator perceives the audience and their exact relationship.
  • Key Audience Factors:
    • Age, socio-economic status (rich, poor, middle class), education level, marital status, and parental status.
    • Disposition (friendly vs. hostile) and specific role (e.g., best friend, parent, psychiatrist).
  • Performance Adjustments Based on Audience:
    • In A Dog's Life, the narrator targets a human audience that is occasionally frustrated by dogs but fundamentally likes and finds them amusing, capitalizing on goodwill to adjust their perspective.
    • In Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, the narrator addresses friends with small-town tales, displaying an innocent, naive charm regarding her family's absurdities.

Textual Excerpts Analysis (Stop and Check)

  • Excerpt #1 (Childhood Beauty Pageants):
    • Perspective: Insider/observer.
    • Content: The narrator sits in a chair recently vacated by a pageant winner and speaks with a stately woman scrutinizing the event. The woman points out her own daughter performing on stage and notes that talent and poise are insufficient without a competitive dress ("You can't wear a sack, you know").
  • Excerpt #2 (1929 Chinese Story):
    • Perspective: Insider, highly subjective, emotionally involved husband.
    • Content: The husband recounts his wife's mounting anxiety and despondency during pregnancy. Despite occasional cheerful conversations about a baby, physical changes cause her to sit alone, immobile, staring blankly, leaving him scared and feeling she is suffering from an invisible, destructive force.
  • Excerpt #3 (New Yorker Short Story):
    • Perspective: Detached third-person observer addressing "you."
    • Content: Describes Christie from Greenwich, Connecticut. To stop people from asking questions after moving to New York, she quickly adds that she attended "the high school" (the public one). While initially disarming, the charm disappears when overheard repeating the exact same confession to others.
  • Excerpt #4 (1952 British Novel):
    • Perspective: Detached, humorous third-person.
    • Content: Lord Emsworth at Blandings Castle feels cornered by his sister, Lady Constance, like a rat cornered by G-men. Relying on "stout denial," he listens as she asks for Penelope Donaldson. Lady Constance explains with strained sweetness that Penelope is the younger daughter of Mr. Donaldson of Long Island City, whose elder daughter is married to Emsworth's younger son Frederick (his heir being Bosham). She demands he stop letting his mouth hang open like a goldfish, to which Emsworth responds, "Quite. Quite."

Cultural Stories

Every culture creates stories originating from lived experiences to transmit fundamental beliefs and values.

  • Fables:
    • Short narratives that explicitly state a moral or cultural wisdom lesson.
    • Characters are typically animals or inanimate objects embodying human motivations and traits essential to the lesson.
    • Example: "The Tortoise and the Hare" features a slow, persistent tortoise and a swift, impulsive hare. The tortoise wins the race, establishing the moral: "Slow and steady wins the race."
  • Folktales:
    • Ancient stories passed down orally through generations by common folk, recounting fabulous or strange events.
    • Focus on universal or archetypal themes involving human hopes, passions, and fears.
    • Feature stylized archetypal characters where good conquers evil (e.g., beautiful princesses, wicked stepmothers, brave princes, loyal soldiers).
    • Fairy Tales: A subset of folktales featuring magical/fabulous entities (e.g., genies in lamps, frogs turned into human princes). Typically open with "Once upon a time" and close with "and they lived happily ever after."
    • Cultural Variations: The French story of "Little Red Riding Hood" corresponds to the German "Little Red Cap" and the Chinese "Lon Po Po" (where three young girls outwit a wolf pretending to be their grandmother).
  • Parables:
    • Short stories teaching moral or religious lessons, often operating on multiple symbolic levels with implicit morals.
    • Example: Jesus's New Testament parable of the sower scattering seed on various soils. The seed represents teachings, the soils represent different types of listeners, and the resulting crop yield represents good works produced.
  • Myths:
    • Ancient narratives conveying a culture's core worldview, explaining cosmic creation, natural phenomena, or the origin of evil through heroes and supernatural beings.
    • Example: The Navajo myth explaining the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) constellation. A sister marries a bear; after the father kills the bear, the sister transforms into Changing Bear Woman to slay six of her seven brothers in revenge. The youngest brother resurrects his brothers, and all seven escape into the sky to form the constellation.
  • Legends:
    • Unlikely stories linked to real historical figures and events, heavily exaggerating traits or actions.
    • Examples: Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.
    • Purpose: Teach vital cultural values such as social justice, aiding the poor, loyalty, and hard work regardless of factual accuracy.
  • Digital Resources for Cultural Performance:
    • Fairy Tales: Accessible online via the SurLaLune Fairy Tale Web site (www.surlalunefairytales.com).
    • Myths and Legends: Found in Bulfinch's Mythology (www.bulfinch.org), which comprises:
    • Volume I: The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes
    • Volume II: The Age of Chivalry, or Legends of King Arthur
    • Volume III: Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages