Longer Fiction / Drama unit test

Symbolic patterns across a work

Frame narrative

Chorus

Foil in extended works

Deus ex machina

Künstlerroman

Subplot

Archetype

Time compression and dilation

Hubris and nemesis

Peripeteia and anagnorisis

Setting as antagonist

This course has no free-response prompt tagged to this unit, so one from elsewhere in the course is used. It is still worth writing — the skill transfers.

PROSE FICTION ANALYSIS (Question 2, 6 points). The passage is from Rachel Cusk's novel The Bradshaw Variations (2008), and describes Thomas Bradshaw's morning interactions with members of his household. The passage, described (read the released passage at AP Central for the full text): The excerpt opens inside Thomas's habitual question — What is art? — which he cannot answer except through his private touchstone, "authenticity": the artificial is easy to spot, the authentic mystifying. At forty-one he imagines a life emerging from its own past like a casting from a mould, either solid or disintegrating, and finds the solidity harder to explain than the collapse. Each morning he stands in the kitchen in his dressing gown listening to Bach or Schubert and waiting for his wife, Tonie, to come down. Instead it is usually Olga, the Polish lodger, whose plodding tread he hears daily and daily fails to recognize. Cusk gives Olga an abundance of concrete, humane detail — the uncertain train-track smile of six months of dentistry, the childhood mother too tender to force her to the dentist, the three jobs whose wages all go to her teeth, the giant cartoon-cat mug and soft slippers — while Thomas, by his own account, is "both there and not there": he waits for Tonie the way a platform guard waits for the London train (her kitchen appearances brief, activity-disgorging, gone), identifies with Olga as a fellow "platform dweller," yet cannot reciprocate her talk, feeling "sealed behind glass." He turns the music up as an "offering, a form of explanation" — wanting her to know he knows his own limitation. The passage closes with his verdict on their kitchen interludes: limitless identical copies of a conversation that never develops and never dies, outside time altogether — perhaps, he thinks, "because it lacks authenticity." Write a well-written essay analyzing how Cusk uses literary elements and techniques to develop a complex portrayal of Thomas. You should: present a thesis with a defensible interpretation; select and use evidence; explain how the evidence supports your reasoning; and use appropriate grammar and punctuation.