Unit 6 Overview: Literary Techniques in Longer Works

Welcome to Unit 6. In this Unit, we’ll be looking at Longer Fiction and Drama again. However, this time we’ll be delving deeper into these longer works. Just like how Unit 4 was about the complexity of short stories, Unit 5 is about the complexity of longer works. In longer texts, you'll often find complexities in character development and actions, interruption in the stream of a narrative, and unreliable characters and narratives. These exist in short stories, of course, but they can be more well-developed and therefore more complicated in longer novels, because the authors have the page count to do so! You'll also find more subtle or more developed symbols than you would in short stories.

What will we be covering in this Unit…?

In this guide, we’ll be discussing how characters can work with one another structurally by examining a common character relationship: the foil. A foil is a character that directly contrasts another in order to make the other character stand out more. Foils (and contrasting characters generally, such as two characters who disagree on a topic) can work within a narrative to emphasize the motivations, decisions, and character traits of their counterpart.

In this guide, we’ll be discussing how to understand and interpret character motives. Characters may or may not tell us what their motives are directly. For example, Shakespeare likes having his characters give soliloquies that reveal their goals and motivations — examples of this are Richard III and Edmund from King Lear. However, often characters, just like humans, don't’ outright say why they do the things they do, and even when they do they can be lying. We can analyze character motives outside of their own confessions by examining their choices, actions and speech (the things they say and the way they say it.)

In this guide, we’ll be talking about some of the exciting things works of literature can do to play around with the traditional linear narrative. In the traditional linear narrative, events in the text are depicted in the order they take place. Non-linear narrative structures such as flashback, foreshadowing and in media res don't follow this rule. This messing with timelines can be very confusing. This guide will help you identify different narrative structures and understand why authors choose to use non-linear ones.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to analyze narrators. Even if they're not unreliable narrators (narrators that aren't telling the truth of what happened), the tone they use to tell a story and any biases they might have will influence the way we experience the story. Ask yourself, is the narrator trying to convince me of something?

We've talked about objects as symbols before, such as a white dove for peace or a red rose for love, but did you know that characters can be symbols as well? In this guide, we’ll discuss characters as not just fictional people, but also symbols and metaphors. For example, a villain's innocent child could be a symbol of his humanity, and the death of that child a symbol for the utter destruction of that humanity. Sometimes, character types are so common and culturally significant, such as the "hero" or the "mentor," that they become archetypes. 

In this guide, we’ll take our essays one step further by discussing how to develop literary arguments outside of the AP test. (Of course, this guide will help you for the AP test as well!) We'll be doing this by developing literary arguments within a broader context of works: using other works to help inform our interpretation of the text we're reading right now. This can take the form of citing other books for comparison or contrasting purposes, looking at other books to establish trends in fiction in a certain region or time period... the possibilities are limitless.