Study Guide to How to Analyze Fiction

HOW TO ANALYZE FICTION

PREFACE

The title of this book is How to Analyze Fiction. I presume that the word analyze will immediately evoke hostile responses in many of my readers. Why must we always analyze everything? thousands of students have asked hundreds of teachers. Why can’t we just enjoy what we read?

It’s a fair question. Enjoyment is, quite properly, what most of us seek in our reading of fiction. And, for all the occasional sneers directed at mere entertainment, it would be very hard indeed to make a convincing case for the superiority of unentertaining fiction.

We may agree, then, that enjoyment, and not analysis, is our end. We want to enjoy what we read. In fact, we want to get the fullest possible measure of enjoyment out of every story that we read. At least, it is on this assumption that this book is written.

This brings us back to the subject of analysis. For it is my position that analysis, properly understood and rightly undertaken, contributes essentially to the full enjoyment of fiction.

Properly understood. For what do we mean by analysis? According to many students, to analyze is to tear things to pieces. Well, that sounds unpleasant enough. In fact, it’s a rather violent way to describe what goes on in most classrooms. But analysis is not quite tearing things to pieces. Or, at least, it’s a good deal more than that.

To analyze a literary work is to identify the separate parts that make it up (this corresponds roughly to the notion of tearing it to pieces), to determine the relationships among the parts, and to discover the relation of the parts to the whole. If some analyses do seem to leave the work torn to pieces, figuratively speaking, this means simply that they are not complete analyses. The end of the analysis is always the understanding of the literary work as a unified and complex whole.

And analysis must be not only properly understood but also rightly undertaken. Analysis itself can often be drudgery, whether the analysis is of a literary work, a chemical compound, or a competitive sport. And the analysis of a literary work has still more to be said against it: it is bound to be artificial. The parts we discern in our analyses exist, after all, rather in the mind of the reader than in the works themselves. To illustrate this point, let’s consider a sentence we might find in a work of fiction: The windows of the old house rattled as John slammed the door. To what part of the story might such a sentence belong?

Well, since the sentence tells of an event, we might be inclined to think of it as a matter of plot. But surely to be told that John is the kind of person who slams doors is to learn something about John. Not plot, then, but character. Look again. The door slammed by John is in an old house with windows that rattle. Setting? Which is it? The answer, of course, is all three. And, in the context of a complete story, this same sentence may have several further functions in addition to those already suggested. The house, for instance, might have some sort of symbolic value. And of course the sentence might be examined as an example of the author’s style.

Analysis, then, may be drudgery and is certainly artificial. Why should we indulge in it at all?

Any athlete knows that practice in any sport is drudgery. And he knows, too, that practice is often artificial. Tackling a dummy is not the same as tackling an opponent-certainly not the same as tackling an opponent who is trying to disappear behind a massive wall of blockers in a championship game with the score 7-7 in the closing minutes of the last quarter. But he knows that the purpose of the practice session is to develop his skills, his co-ordination, and his reflexes so that he can make the tackle without stopping to think about it - that is, without analyzing what he’s doing.

Literary analysis of the sort this book invites you to undertake may be compared to practice in a sport. By analysis, you will develop intellectual and emotional skills, co-ordination, and reflexes to the point where you’ll be able to use them without stopping to think of what you’re doing. You’ll become aware of many of the things that go on in fiction, in the hope that eventually this awareness will operate as you read, rather than in a classroom post-mortem. What the inexperienced reader discovers by painful analysis, the experienced reader grasps, so it seems, by instinct. But in most cases the instinct has been developed by experience in analysis.

Analysis rightly undertaken, then, is analysis undertaken for the ultimate purpose of making analysis unnecessary. Your goal should be to develop, by the exercise of analysis, your skills as a reader so that eventually you may move on from the work of analyzing fiction to the joy of experiencing it.

The present book makes no claims to originality, either in content or format. I have felt that what the reader wants is the clearest possible concise exposition of established notions of fiction, rather than original but possibly erratic theories.

HOW TO ANALYZE FICTION

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 1 PLOT

CHOICE

Fiction And Choice: The act of writing, whether one is writing a complex three-volume novel or a personal letter to a close friend, consists of a series of choices. To see just what this means, let’s consider the simpler form, the personal letter, first.

Choice In A Personal Letter: In writing a personal letter, we begin making choices at the very beginning - at the salutation as it is usually called. We begin Dear________. Dear what? Analyzing our relationship to the intended recipient of the letter permits us to choose the salutation properly. If the letter is to a personal friend, we choose to address him by his first name, perhaps even by a nickname. A more distant acquaintance calls for a more formal salutation, a more intimate one may suggest a more intimate salutation. On the one hand, Dear Mr. Brown, on the other, Darling. The choice is ours.

Of course, the choice is not entirely free. We are limited to some extent by custom, to some extent by what we understand as the expectations of the person who is to read the letter. Still, we must decide what custom applies to the particular situation in which we find ourselves. We must decide to what extent we are going to be bound by custom. And we must decide just what are the expectations of the person to whom we address ourselves. And we may have to decide whether there is some good reason to disappoint those expectations. For instance, she may expect me to address her as Darling, since I normally do, but I want her to know at once that I’m displeased with her: Dear Mary.

Many of the choices we make in these situations are, of course, not conscious choices. Most often, we instinctively choose the right salutation and make similarly correct choices right down to the closing (Sincerely? Love?). But conscious or not, all of them are significant. All of them contribute to the total meaning we communicate to the reader.

Choice In Writing A Story: The writer of fiction, like the writer of a letter, faces a series of choices. Some of the choices he makes are fully conscious; some are not. But all are significant; all contribute to making the story what it is and not another thing.

Further, the writer of fiction must recognize that there are limits to the choices available to him. Conventions, in some cases established by the practice of writers over many centuries, have led to the development of expectations on the part of readers. The writer must take these conventions and expectations into account. But he must decide for himself what conventions are appropriate to what he is doing. He must decide to what extent he is willing to follow convention. He must decide which of the reader’s expectations are relevant to the sort of story he is writing. And he may decide that he is justified in violating the reader’s expectations for the sake of some higher purpose.

Choice And The Reader: What have the choices facing the writer to do with the experience of the reader of fiction? I suggest that the best way to develop a full awareness of what’s going on in any story you may read is to develop an awareness of the choices the author has made, the choices that have given the story its distinctive shape. This includes, of course, an awareness of the alternatives open to the author. Your purpose is not to determine why the author made these choices (often he’s not sure himself), but rather to discover how the author’s choices have combined to produce the unified story you have before you.

The Choice Of Subject: It is natural to think of the author’s series of choices as beginning with the choice of subject. In fact, however, the writer may not begin by thinking in terms of subject at all. A chance remark, a fleeting insight into character, a striking image - any of these may be the true origin of a story. Such matters are, however, more relevant to the author’s biography or to a study of the creative process than to the analysis of a particular story. If the writer does not always begin with a subject, the reader is inclined to begin by wondering what the story is about - which is one way of saying what the subject is. And this is surely a question (again, perhaps not consciously asked) that the writer must answer early in the process of writing his story.

But of course the writer, unlike the reader, does not merely discover his subject; he chooses it, although the choice may be so instinctively made as to seem almost a discovery.

SUBJECT

The Meaning Of Subject: Words like subject, content, form, and style are so freely used in discussions of literature that we must always be sure of what we mean by them. Often subject and content are treated as synonyms. In this book, they are not. Content as I use the word means what the work contains. Content is essentially identical with form. We may sometimes find it desirable, for purposes of discussion,