05.04 Novel/Short Story Analysis Worksheet
DIRECTIONS
Use complete sentences to respond to each question about your novel or short story.
When providing quotes from your text, include page numbers in parentheses.
1. Discuss two examples of suspense or humor created by point of view in your novel or short story. Provide a quotation from the text to support your answers.
2. Identify an example of dramatic irony in your novel or short story. If your story has not presented any examples of dramatic irony, describe your own suggestion for adding dramatic irony to a scene from your novel or short story.
The story :
No one in the class could remember a time when there wasn't rain.
"Ready?"
"Now?"
"Soon."
"Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?"
"Look, look; see for yourself!"
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
"It's stopping, it's stopping!"
"Yes, yes!"
Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn't rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:
I think the sun is a flower;
That blooms for just one hour:
That was Margot's poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
" "Aw, you didn't write that!" protested one of the boys.
"I did," said Margot, "I did."
"William!" said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.