Length: approximately 1000-1300 words (double-spaced; 12 pt font; 1” margins) F

Length: approximately 1000-1300 words (double-spaced; 12 pt font; 1” margins)
Format: MLA (If you know MLA format, great, but don’t sweat it if you don’t. It’s useful to at least know how to do a Works Cited page and to include parenthetical page numbers after any direct quotes.)
Sources: There are no required sources for this paper. However, avoid .com sites like Grade Saver or Spark Notes. I am interested in your thoughts. I’m using TurnItIn so if you have any accidental plagiarism, you should be able to note and correct that before you submit your paper.
Reflect on the five books you have read for this course, two collections of stories and three novels. You’ve met a broad cast of characters across these texts, some major characters around whom an entire novel or story revolves, and secondary characters who are often crucial to a story or novel’s development. Select one character from one of our assigned texts, a character you find especially compelling or even fascinating, and write a 3-page essay on why this particular character is so crucial to your overall reading or engagement with the text. If you select a character from a story rather than a novel, your primary focus should be on just the story where that character appears, but you might also feel a need to connect that character to an overarching theme or motif present in the entire story collection. If you select a character from one of the three assigned novels, your focus should likewise be on connecting that character to an overall theme or motif central to the novel.
In this paper, your goal should be to highlight and analyze why you find this character especially compelling. How and why are they crucial to the story/novel as a whole? How and why do you respond to this character as a reader? You might decide to hone in on the actions and choices of this character in relation to the overall themes at play in the text, or you might decide to spend time on how the author portrays this character, focusing on aspects of the writer’s ability to develop this character in significant ways. Whatever the case, do not waste time in your intro discussing all the characters you considered before choosing one. Make sure your first paragraph identifies what you will be focusing on in your discussion of this character, and try to craft a focusing thesis for your reader, a thesis that will be elucidated by the remainder of your essay.