Revised Open Prompt 4

2002. Morally ambiguous characters -- characters whose behavior discourages readers from identifying them as purely evil or purely good -- are at the heart of many works of literature. Choose a novel or play in which a morally ambiguous character plays a pivotal role. Then write an essay in which you explain how the character can be viewed as morally ambiguous and why his or her moral ambiguity is significant to the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

I once read that 'Only crazy people see things in black and white'; in that case, there has to be ambiguity in every character ever written, no matter how seemingly onesided the character may be. This seems to be the case in Edward Albee's play The American Dream, where a character named Mommy, whose major role in the play is to simply emasculate her husband and obsess over how 'well off' she is. Though, with all her bad qualities, the reader never identifies her as 'evil' nor 'good', because, through a litany of literary techniques, Albee was able to characterize Mommy so that she comes to life, where, in her, resides both the good and bad of humanity. Mommy in Albee's play functions as a contrasting figure representing the present state of society in comparison's to Grandma's traditional beliefs.

The American Dream showcases a classic dysfunctional American family, one where no one in the household can have satisfaction, where the past plays not role in the present and every moment could act independently from the moment before. 

Mommy acts as the present society, obsessed about what is posh and glamorous, going so far as to differentiate between a hat that is wheat and beiged color because a 'wheat' colored hat would not seem so very fashionable. The truth of the matter was was that the hats were the same and she was easily persuaded by someone of supposedly higher class. Furthermore, Mommy goes out of her way to control Daddy and almost everything around her, including her son whom she killed because "it had eyes only for Daddy". Through and through, we see Mommy's character portrayed very negatively yet the reader hesitates to truly call her "evil." I think in this case, Mommy is meant to represent society as well as human nature, to represent ourselves taken to an extreme and to call her evil would be misunderstanding Albee's point. Mommy is not 'evil' or 'good' but a product of her environment, she was simply bred that way.

Through his portrayal of Mommy, The American Dream is further heighten because it fits into the imagery the playwrite has created; Grandma as the old American Dream, the Young Man as the current American Dream and Mommy as the changing character who picks and chooses which dream she wants. Albee is showing the reader what could become because naturally, being humans, everyone is at one time or another, childish and hateful, kind yet resentful and hopeful, all of which Mommy displays at one point or another (in varying degrees).


The American Dream is a novel depicting the changing American values and Mommy plays a center role in communicating Albee's message of showcasing the distance American values are putting against tradition.

Revised Open Prompt 3

1996. The British novelist Fay Weldon offers this observation about happy endings. "The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from their readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending, I do not mean mere fortunate events -- a marriage or a last minute rescue from death -- but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death." Choose a novel or play that has the kind of ending Weldon describes. In a well-written essay, identify the "spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation" evident in the ending and explain its significance in the work as a whole.

Childhood has often been marked as a time of discovery and growth, where we learn to deal with the consequences of our actions, where the classic coming of age story begins. In To Kill a Mocking Bird, the young narrator, Scout, comes to an emotional and mental epiphany by the end of the novel as she is standing on Boo Radley’s porch.  Harper Lee paints a novel of Scout’s emotional development and eventual understanding of the world when ‘understanding’ one and another became a rare and novelty action.

To Kill a Mockingbird, is a classic novel about a young girl living in a small town, Maycomb, during a time where racial tension ran high. Through her experiences with her brother, friend and father, as well as a mysterious neighbor deemed “Boo” Radley, Scout, by the end of the story, comes to see the world from another person’s eyes.

Scout’s initial mindset at the start of the book was childish and immature, typical of a child, having no understanding or respect towards others. Scout’s description of Boo Radley was nothing short of a monster; she thought of him as a person who only came out at night, ate small animals, had teeth made for maiming things and bloodshot eyes. Although, by the end of the novel, after seeing an innocent man condemned and being saved by Boo Radley himself, Scout reaches a moment of emotional epiphany and growth as she stands on Boo Radley’s doorstep and sees the world, her world, from his point of view. Harper Lee uses a rather nostalgic tone as Scout describes seeing herself from Boo Radley’s doorstep many summers ago, making a play out of Boo Radley. This innocence that she possessed at the start of the novel has grown into maturity as she is able to do what her father said, to go “into someone’s skin and walk around in it”.

This moment of revelation in Scout’s life is central to the ongoing theme of the novel, the idea that one should treat another as he would like to be treated, no matter their skin color or of how you first judge them.  The novel’s title To Kill a Mockingbird directly relates to Scout and the plot of the novel as Tom Robinson, a falsely accused black man symbolizing a mockingbird is killed, because Scout no longer possesses the naiveté that drove her mostly white town to convict Tom Robinson in the first place. Instead, Scout has finally obtained the ability to see the world from another person’s eyes and realize that they are the same, that they are equal, to everyone else. So no longer makes fun of Boo Radley, sneaking into his backyard and leaves his doorstep with respect towards the man.

The ability to truly understand and empathize for a person may be more common known now than it was during Scout’s time. Since then, the world has grown more liberal but during Harper Lee’s time, a court may hold a guilty verdict simply for the color of a man’s skin. In her novel, Lee exploits this continuing theme in her time through the eyes of a child that has yet been taint by society’s corruption. She, instead, shows the insight that Scout achieves by using Boo Radley and Scout’s relationship as parallelism to that of a white and black man in her time. Only this time, Scout doesn’t hold a guilty verdict on Boo Radley, she comes to understand and respect him.

Revised Open Prompt 2

2009. A symbol is an object, action, or event that represents something or that creates a range of associations beyond itself. In literary works a symbol can express an idea, clarify meaning, or enlarge literal meaning. Select a novel or play and, focusing on one symbol, write an essay analyzing how that symbol functions in the work and what it reveals about the characters or themes of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

One of the most basic survivals skills is to eat, without it, we lack the energy to function. However, in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens takes hunger to a whole new level. From one simple scene, the dropping of a wine crate in the middle of the street, Dickens characterizes the societal needs, wants and motivation during the book's setting. The one scene set in the beginning of the book establishes the motifs and meaning behind Dicken's story, he uses to breaking of the wine crate and the chaos to display the societal hunger for freedom and equality.

A Tale of Two Cities is set around the late 1700s in either Paris and London, where there is conflict between the aristocratic class and the suffering peasants that work beneath them that eventually leads to the French Revolution. In the streets of France, outside of a wine shop a wine casket is broken, where red wine is split into the streets and its peasants begin to lap up the split wine like wild, untamed animals, a peasant writing 'BLOOD' on the wall with it.

Dickens describes the scene as chaotic and provides a grotesque and disturbed attitude towards the crowd that is swarming simply for wine. This chaotic hunger for a liquid is meant to represent the hunger that the peasants have for food, literally, and for freedom. In the book, the aristocratic characters are described to be evil, foreboding characters that have no sympathy towards anyone that works beneath them, especially the peasants. They are described to the overworked and under appreciated muscles of France, dying from hunger. The hunger is then taken metaphorically when the reader realizes that the setting is during the French Revolution, when peasants became rebels, starving for the freedom that French higher class and royalty has taken from them.

The mad scene in which hordes of people are crowding around food, lapping up red wine is also meant to represent the mob mentality which plays out later in the book as well as foreshadowing the eventual deaths of French Aristocrats. The red wine symbol can also be extended to mean blood, which is exactly what Dickens wants the reader to realize when a peasant, hand soaked in wine write 'blood' on the walls of the street. Indeed, the symbolism in the fallen win crate, the mob mentality and blood, is then realized when the peasants join together quiet literally spill the blood of the French royalty and their suppressors on the streets in which the wine had been split earlier in the novel.

Charles Dickens grew up during a time that was barely making its way out of the French Revolution and he himself came to critique the society of his time, where a frenzied mob with the same motivations held the same amount of weight as it did in his novel. Dickens uses the split wine to embody the hunger for justice and freedom of people who were ignored and at the same time, extends his metaphor to show the mob mentality through the red wine's color and the actions taken to obtain it and what was done with it.

Revised: Open Prompt 1

2010. Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience. Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Alienation and exile can be a frightening experience that allows for character development in both the real and literary world; a scared new student put into a new high school may be shy at first but can overcome that fear and develop a new confidence in himself.  Likewise, the character Tayo in Ceremony by Leslie Silko feels estranged from Native American culture because he is part Indian and part white. Coming home from the trauma of World War II, after losing his brother figure, Rocky, Tayo realizes the rift in himself and struggles to put those two parts of him together. Silko uses this rift in Tayo is symbolize the generational difference in the young and older Natives and how it could be healed by a ceremony.

Tayo's internal strife that the novel centers around comes from his surroundings yet starts in his roots. His father is estrange, presumably a white man that slept with his mother who abandons him at four years old with his uncle, Josiah. While Josiah does his best to incorporate him into the family, his wife, called Auntie, distances him from her and her son, Rocky. The alienation grows even further as Tayo comes back from World War II, where he struggles with the part of him that relates to the old, spiritual ways while growing up in a changing culture.

Eventually, Tayo does find a way to heal the two parts of him; by doing a ceremony. The series of events, objects and people are meant to allow him accept certain things in his life that he has not and embrace a part of himself. He falls in love with Ts'eh, also known as Montano, symbolizing his love for the wild and clues him in on the fact that the ceremony actually exists. Once he begins to believe in it, animals also begin to appear to help him, making Tayo acknowledge the fact that he also has a deep belief in the mythical teachings that whites disdain. By the end of the summer, he is able to return the missing cattle that Josiah had bought; thus letting Auntie accept him into the family. Finally, he completes the ceremony by watching the death of his friend, Harley, accepting that life completes itself in a circle and death is the end and there was no use in bringing back the past, something that Tayo struggles through. By the end of the novel, Tayo is able to return home, accepted into his family and community, completed and whole by healing the two sides of himself.


The internal strife within Tayo is also used to generalize Silko's theme of consolation between the generational differences within Native Americans, the older believing in spirituality and the young embracing American culture while forgetting their roots. Tayo represents these two conflicting sides and his eventual consolation between the two sides of him also helps bridge his separating community. 

The rift that Tayo has between himself is important to the novel because it comes to symbolize the many things that Silko is trying to say; its not just a division of Tayo but also representative of the rift between of two cultures as well as the different generations in Native American culture. Having Tayo complete the ceremony, Silko proves her point that there are problems created by the intrusion of American culture but it can be eventually cured.

Synthesis of Course Material 4: The Other Just As Important Stuff

Along the way of learning about tragedy and DIDLSand annotation and how to write Open/Closed Prompts, there were other stuffs too. There included how to write in plain style, these time consuming blog posts, forums, how to answer multiple choice questions and eras of literature. Oh and 128 vocab words that we memorized.

Plain style is plain and not so easy. It's simply putting your words in the most effective and simplest way possible so that your point is there and it's clear. Which is sometimes hard because I like to write and embellish.  Along the way, we posted lots and lots of blog posts to practice for the open and closed prompts, though i'm pretty sure some of my peers BS'ed theirs so bad you need a lifetime supply of diapers to keep it from leaking. We did this for practice and we commented on others because sometimes it's just easier to hear it from a peer then a teacher. Plus Holmes woulda never read every single one of 'em.

Forums are my favorite though. You post your opinion and you get other people's opinion. Simple as that.

We've practiced for MCQ (multiple choice questions) several times and i've somehow been absent for every single one of those lessons except the last one. So, i'm not too sure but i think the idea is to read questions, passage, answer the question without choices, find choices that match yours and bubble. Also leave the "all of the following are true/false" until the end 'cause they're uber time consuming.

Eras of literature help us understand where the author is coming from because we need to understand the enviroment he/she lived in when they wrote the work and how it could have possibly affected the piece of work. This further helped us to reach our goal of understanding the meaning of the novel/play/poem.

Lastly, we had this enormous list of vocab words that turned out to be super helpful because instead of saying something like "the repeated words created a harsh tone" you could just say "the epizuxis (did i spell that right)  in lines 28-29 functioned as...."

And that AP Lit!

Synthesis of Course Material 3: Literature

I'm actually sorta sad I couldn't put in a clever title for this one.

Anyways, we have these wonderful lectures and powerpoints over literature itself, because you need to understand the stuff you're writing about. Theres so much it that its hard to know where to start. I guess I'll go with the king and start with DIDLS.

We learned about DIDLS but also the sublevels of DIDLS, there are connotations and denotations to the language and diction used, so many inlocking layers of how an author can establish a certain effect.We're also learned about comedies and tragedies. Comedies started out the beginning of the year, we learned why we laughed, how an author can get us to laugh while still retaining literary merit (it's all high comedy) while throwing in comic relief (toliet humor) as well. There was also this confusing thing called Theatre of the Absurd that i didn't quiet get too well too.
We learned about this great circle that encompassed a majority of the literary work, where a character in a novel may start at a high place and fall, and depending on where he landed, told you what sort of work it was, a tragedy if he landed at the bottom of the circle, if he started low and ended low it's irony, so on. And of course there was tragedy. It's a tricky thing, to call something a tragedy because, really, it may end in a character's death or the gruesome scene where he is mortally wounded but actually, theres the emotional revelation behind it that isn't all that bad. Thats what a tragedy is, not a story with a bad ending but a story with an ending thats realistic tied in with an epiphany.

Synthesis of Course Material 2: The Art of Annotations and Class Discussions

We get these wonder little novels and plays that we first read. Then we go and reread the thing and then write in lots and lots of comments and questions in and then we discuss. It's fun.
But theres also a sense of discovery to it. Because what you thought the first time definitely wasn't what you thought of the second read and may chance once hearing your classmates opinions. The first reason we do this is because we need to practice for the AP because you'll have to read lots and lots and sift through lots and lots to find the meaning of the work. In a sense, it helped with the close reading prompts we have to do but the novels we read and discuss about also help with the open prompts.
The open prompts are prompts given but you are open to use an work "of literary merit" (I'm talking to you Twilight) to prove the claim that the prompt has given so. So of course the works we read are somewhere controversial and always layered with opinions and dozens of Wild Mass Guesses because we all need to establish what the meaning of the novel was.
I think, most of the time, there are several meanings working within one large meaning the novel is trying to convey with the things we read because the open prompts vary and we need to have a large toolbelt of experience and exposures to different means with can pick from when writing.

Synthesis of Course Material 1: DIDLS is king and Essays are his mistress

Really. I mean, i can't even pound in the point any further than DIDLS rules all.
See in the AP exams, you have these wonder essays in which you have to write lots and lots about that you're not even sure where you start. So, Ms. Holmes and all the English teachers have given us DIDLS (really, i still pronounce that diddles) which stands for Diction, Imagery, Details, Language and Syntax.
Diction is word choice, imagery is description that appeals to our five (really six) senses, details is information given, language is the use of...language and syntax is the order placement of those words. But authors use DIDLS to communicate a deeper message so you use DIDLS to decipher them, why the author chose to describe something a certain way, why he chose this word and not that. By analyzing this, we come to a deeper understanding of the work and eventually establish the meaning of the work that the author has written.
Thats how you come to write our closed prompts. You analyze the piece, first trying to figure the meaning and seeing if the meaning matches with what the DIDLS tells you. Once you have an established meaning and all the textual evidence, you begin to write your essay.
Essay writting is a bit tricky, in that if you don't start well it's not gonna end well for you. If you start with a strong thesis with a strong meaning backed with great evidence, you're great. If somewhere along the way, you evidence contradicts what you have written you're sort screwed.
In any case, you evidence should be made up of techniques (DIDLS) that create effect (tone/mood) used to reinforce the meaning of the novel. Thought you don't need effect sometimes, sometimes the technique says it all, most of the time it's a mixer.