____________________ is an image, object, character, or action that stands in for an idea beyond its literal meaning. An example could be a snake representing evil.

____________________ is the moment when the action of a story comes to its highest point of dramatic conflict, usually before the actual ending of a story.

____________________ is a technique that gives clues about events that will happen later in the story.

The final line of Tolstoy’s story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need,” reads thus: “Six feet from his head to his toes was all he needed.” The main character, Pahom, had been working for years to increase the amount of land he owned and died trying to get more. Therefore, this is an example of:

The ____________________ is the background material about the characters, setting, and dramatic situation with which the author introduces the essentials of the story to the reader. It usually comes at or near the beginning of a story.

In "The Moment before the Gun Went Off," Marais Van der Vyver, a white farmer, is accidentally responsible for his own son's death, due to a gun going off after he hit a bump in the road while they were looking for kudu. However, Marais lived in the time of apartheid in South Africa, which was like segregation in the U.S. His son's mother was a black woman who worked on their farm, and Marais and the woman grew up together. Marais, therefore, as a member of his community and a National Party member, never was able to acknowledge his son publically. He was also married and had three other kids. What is the author's reason for writing a story such as this?

_______________ is the main idea of a story and the message that the story intends to communicate, often expressing a universal truth through the specifics of the story.

In Saki’s story, “The Open Window,” the main character, Framton Nuttel, has gone to a country estate to recover from some mental issues (nerves). As soon as he gets there, the young girl tells him a story which finally causes him to make a “headlong retreat” and run out of the house in a panic. This is an example of a ___________ since the very place he went to recover has increased his mental problems.

In Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” about Pahom, a Russian peasant, he says that if he had enough land, he would not even "fear the Devil himself." This attracts the Devil's attention, and thus the Devil is the ___________ of the story since Pahom is tempted several times to acquire more land., eventually leading to his ruin.

The typical pattern, or order of events, for a short story is:

A protagonist is usually:

The narrator is:

In Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need,” Pahom, a former peasant, comes to own land, and other peasants begin trespassing and cutting trees on his land. Pahom has them fined and dragged into court. The universal truth expressed here is:

The conflict is:

In “Mold of the Earth” by Boleslaw Prus, the main character/narrator is studying a rock with splotches (lichens) fighting each other and expanding and contracting. He also imagines he is looking down on the world. The borders also expand and contract, and small points (people) move about in the midst of the changing borders. One possible theme from this story could be:

___________ is the main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.

In a story such as "The Moment before the Gun Went Off," it is important to understand the ___________ of the story in order to realize why Marais Van der Vyver could not acknowledge his own son, Lucas, who was a worker on Marais's farm. Marias lived in South Africa before the end of apartheid, which was the system of racial segregation that divided people by skin color. They also had laws against mixed-race marriages and relationships between men and women.

____________ is the term used to describe any story involving a deal with the Devil.

In "Under the Withaak's Shade," Oom Schalk Lourens is telling his story about the the leopard: "In the meantime, the leopard had got up as far as my knees. He was studying my trousers very carefully, and I started getting embarrassed. My trousers were old and rather unfashionable. Also, at the knee, there was a torn place, from where I had climbed through a barbed-wire fence, into the thick bush, the time I saw the Government tax-collector coming over the bult before he saw me. The leopard stared at that rent in my trousers for quite a while, and my embarrassment grew. I felt I wanted to explain about the Government tax-collector and the barbed wire. I didn’t want the leopard to get the impression that Schalk Lourens was the sort of man who didn’t care about his personal appearance."

This excerpt makes the narrator seem ____________.