Longer Fiction or Drama III

The story spends little time on minor characters, so they rarely change; their job is usually to push the plot forward or to bring out something in the main characters. With a major character, whether they change or stay the same is often a big part of what the work means.

Watch how characters react as the conflict resolves. Their words and actions show what they value, and when a character does something that doesn't fit how they've acted before, it should make you rethink that character, the people around them and the work's ideas.

The biggest events in a long work usually bring the central conflict to a head, showing two sets of values crashing into each other. As one event leads to the next and the pressure adds up, the writer builds anticipation and suspense.

When the suspense or central conflict finally resolves, readers may feel catharsis, an emotional release. Some pressure on a character comes from things the story never shows, like a character who never appears or something that happened before the story began. Some endings leave conflicts unresolved, and that open ending shapes how you read the whole work.

Longer works often give you several characters' or narrators' views of the same events. A narrator can also change over the course of the story through what they do and experience, and shifts or inconsistencies in their perspective can create irony and complexity.

In the literary argument essay you pick a work of fiction, usually a novel or play you know well, and argue how it develops the idea in the prompt. Defend a clear thesis with specific evidence from across the book and explain how it builds meaning in the work as a whole, which the top evidence-and-commentary score requires.