Choose one of the stories assigned, excluding the excerpt from Tarzan of the Apes, and use it to complete this discussion board. After you have narrowed your topic to one of the stories, either “The Flowers” or “Killings,” narrow your topic further to one of the elements discussed in the chapter, which appear in bold. Finish crafting your thesis by making a claim about how or why the author uses the literary element that you narrowed down to in the story. Examples of narrowed topics include but are not limited to: plot, flashback, character, exposition, antagonist, protagonist, etc. Read the chapter carefully so that you can understand all of the elements of literature discussed within, especially the element that you choose to narrow down to. After you craft your thesis, choose a quote within the story that you are analyzing as evidence. First, provide your thesis and then write into and out of the quote that you chose as evidence for your claim/thesis. What I mean by that is you should introduce the quote with a couple of sentences and then afterward explain how the quote connects to your thesis. For example:
In her short story “The Flowers,” Alice Walker provides foreshadowing for her protagonist’s eventual unsettling discovery with the narrator’s descriptions of Myop’s surroundings. In the story, her protagonist, Myop, makes her way through the woods behind her house. As she moves deeper into the woods, Myop begins to notice a gradual strangeness begin to develop around her. The narrator tells us that as Myop gets about a mile away from the safety and security of her home that “it seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself” (76). This happens just before Myop makes her grizzly discovery. The gloominess of her surroundings unnerves her and causes her to turn back towards home, which leads directly into her unnerving encounter that serves as the climax of the story. This foreshadowing prepares the reader for this climax. (I want to point out a few things. Notice, first, the thesis. The narrowed topic is underlined, and the controlling idea is in italics. Your controlling idea need not be any more complex than that. Second, pay attention to the in-text citation. This is an example of MLA formatting when using sources. It provides the reader with the page number in parentheses so that the reader can find the quote. Observe the punctuation and match it in your discussion board.)
