Assignment Two
Character Analysis

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. (Shakespeare, Othello, 2.3.261-263)

Objective

To construct a persuasive, engaging argument about a chosen character from one of the works we have studied this semester using references to specific quotations as evidence.

Overview

We often discuss the behavior of characters in works of literature just as we would discuss people in our own lives. We evaluate their actions according to our own set of moral guidelines, and we think about the events that motivate them to behave as they do. Indeed, it is very easy for us to get into arguments about a character's virtues or faults. At the extreme will classify a character as a hero or as a villain in such discussions, though most characters fall somewhere in the middle.

In this paper, you will want to choose one character from one of the works assigned in this class. Choose a work that interests you and a character whose experiences or behavior in the work give you a basis for a good, solid argument. The argument can be about the character's qualities or importance or both. Be sure, however, that the thesis of you paper is arguable. The thesis "Iago is a villain" is not in itself arguable—most readers will readily agree with this claim.

Whereas the first paper required you to focus on a single passage for your argument, this paper will require you to consider the work as a whole in which the character appears. This means that you will include several quotations to support your argument. Such quotations might be from the writer's description of a character, or they might things the character does or says. To add clarity to your argument, it might be necessary to compare one character to other characters in the book.

Develop an interesting thesis for this paper. "Iago is bad" is too general to be an interesting (or arguable) thesis.

NOTE: If you choose a character from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, be sure you can refer to a few different poems in the collection to support your argument. Do not just write about one poem.

Questions for Development

I do not expect you to answer each of the following questions in writing this paper, but I do expect the answers to some of them to help you develop this argument.

• Does the character have heroic qualities? (Remember that the original heroes were like Odysseus in The Odyssey. They were noble in rank, and they were warriors who were often descended from the gods. Our current definition of heroism has deviated over time from that original ideal, and our readings for this class have traced that deviation from Odysseus to John Dollar, the absent hero of the last novel in the course.)

• Is the character villainous in any way?

• How does the character regard his or her own actions? Is this the same as how other characters in the work regard these actions?

• What is this character's community like? What are its standards governing behavior? How well is the character integrated into his or her surrounding community? How is this community different from our current community?

• Does this character have any idiosyncrasies that are worth our attention?

• What is the character's class? Which characteristics serve to define that class? Does the character seek to change his or her class status, or does the character strive to maintain his or her current status?

• What is the character's gender and how does this gender restrict or liberate this character?

• What are the defining moments in the life of this character? Are there any defining moments in this character's life that take place outside of the literary work in question (i.e. before the beginning of the story)?

• Why should an audience of readers in the year 2000 care about what happens to this character?

• What does the author of the work think of this character? (Often, though not always, authors reward virtue and punish evil in their characters, so the story's outcome tips us off as to their attitudes toward these characters.)

• What distinguishes this character from other characters in the work? What distinguishes this character from other characters in literature? Does this character have any doubles or counterparts in the work?

Some Writing Tips

I have developed these tips from comments I had about Assignment One when I graded it.

1. Develop an arguable and interesting thesis statement that applies directly to your chosen character and the work in which he or she appears.

   Example:

   ARGUABLE THESIS (for a different assignment): Though we currently tend to celebrate cultural diversity, William Shakespeare's Othello characterizes cultural diversity as a dangerous destabilizing force that must be overcome through the violent imposition of cultural conformity.

   NOT AN ARGUABLE THESIS: Othello is about a Moor who falls in love with a Venetian woman and eventually strangles her.

   ARGUABLE THESIS (again, for a different assignment): Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology argues at political, religious and aesthetic levels that the community consciousness is unjust and arbitrary in the way it treats individuals.

   POSSIBLY AN ARGUABLE THESIS, BUT IT DOES NOT ADDRESS THE ASSIGNMENT: Communities often mistreat individuals who live in them.

2. Organize your argument around this thesis statement. Think of between two and four sub-points and structure your argument around them.

   Example (for the above Othello thesis):

   1. Othello represents one form of cultural deviation in Othello.
   2. The island of Cyprus represents a mixture of cultural influences.
   3. At the end of the play, Venetian civilization emerges victorious by removing Othello and taking complete control over Cyprus.

3. Some grammatical tips:

   1. Avoid using the passive voice whenever it is possible to do so. When writing in the passive voice, you remove the subject from the sentence or at least de-emphasize it. This makes writing less engaging to most readers.

      Example:

      PASSIVE VOICE: Ginger eats spaghetti. (Note structure: subject/verb/object)
      

      ACTIVE VOICE: Spaghetti is eaten. (Structure: object/"to be" verb/past participle)

      PASSIVE VOICE: Ginger ate spaghetti.
                                } Passive voice can exist in any verb tense.
      ACTIVE VOICE: Spaghetti was eaten.

   2. AVOID CONTRACTIONS when writing college papers. Replace "they're" with "they are" and replace "don't" with "do not" (these are just a few examples of the numerous possible contractions out there.

   3. Use apostrophes (') to signify possession and the letter 's' to signify a plural. When a word is both possessive and a plural using 's', but the apostrophe after the 's'. The possessive of dog is dog's. The possessive of dogs is dogs'. If someone's last name ends with 's', you have a choice. You can either put the apostrophe after the 's', or you can add an apostrophe 's'. For example, the plural of Edgar Lee Masters is either Masters' or Masters's.

   4. Notice in the above description that I have italicized the words dog and Masters. Italicization is the best way to signal that you are referring to a word itself and not to the thing that the word represents. You should also italicize titles of books (even in parenthetical references and lists of works cited) and foreign-language words like je ne sais quoi.

   5. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it. Its and whose both deviate from the above rule about possessives.

   6. A grammatically complete sentence has at least one subject and one verb. If it is missing a subject or a verb, it is a sentence fragment. Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.

   7. Commas. These are tricky little bits of punctuation, and your best bet is to look them up in a style manual. All the same, there are two things I should mention.

      First, a comma is a very fragile, spindly, little thing, and it is not strong enough to string two grammatically complete sentences together all by itself. When you use a comma for this purpose, it is called a comma splice.

      Example:

      WRONG: I hope it starts snowing soon, snow would make Duluth so much prettier.

      See that poor little comma? It is just dying under the strain.

      CORRECT: I hope it starts snowing soon, because snow would make Duluth so much prettier.
      ALSO CORRECT: I hope it starts snowing soon. Snow would make Duluth so much prettier.

      Second, if the first word of your sentence is not the subject of the sentence, then it is a good idea to use a comma to separate the subject from whatever precedes it. If it only one word precedes the subject, then this rule is optional, but a whole phrase really does need a comma after it before you get on with the rest of the sentence.

      Example:

      WRONG: In the last days of May I fell into a well.

      CORRECT: In the last days of May, I fell into a well.

      OPTIONAL: Certainly you can understand where I am coming from.

      OR: Certainly, you can understand where I am coming from.

Grading Standards

In grading this assignment, I will use the following criteria. Late papers will lose points according to how late they are. Papers under five pages long will lose points as well.