Worksheet: Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Steel Windpipe”
Read:
Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Steel Windpipe” (Attached)
Review the sections on on Narration, Point of View, Dialogue, and Setting in Essential Literary Terms. (below)
Read pp. 180-191 (Structure) in Essential Literary Terms.
Then answer the following questions:
Protagonist:
- Identify the protagonist.
- Identify a passage of dialogue that you think particularly reveals something about the protagonist. (Remember to not only look at what is said but how it is said.) What does the passage show us about his character?
Opening / Exposition:
3. What is the setting? (Describe it.)
- How does the setting affect the plot of this story?
- Provide brief descriptions of the following characters:
- the narrator
- the feldsher
- the mother
- the old woman
- Lidka
Inciting Incident:
6. What is the incident that describes the problem?
- What is the conflict the protagonist must face?Mid-point:
8. What revelation/insight does the protagonist have during the narrative? (Hint: It is within the argument with the mother.)
Climax:
9. How does the problem get resolved?
Theme:
10. Considering the plot structure you have just described, what is the theme?
- According to Essential Literary Terms, what is the difference between Plot and Story?
- What does the term In Media Resmean in relation to a story? (see the definition in Essential Literary Terms)
- Does this story begin In Media Res?
Truth:
14. Does the theme represent a truth in life? What is it?
Further inquiries:
- What is the relationship like between the narrator and his assistants? between the narrator and the patients?
- Why do you think Lidka doesn’t speak to him?
Content from Text book if needed:
Narration refers to the act of telling a story, whether in prose or in verse, and the means by which that telling is accomplished. The main narrative forms in prose are the novel, the novella, and the short story; narrative forms in verse are the epic, and other poems, such as the romance, that contain an explicit or implicit plot and individualized characters. The drama is also narrative in the sense that it tells a story, but it does so directly, with characters who act out the plot on a stage and who speak for themselves, usually without the intermediary of a narrator. In its broad sense, narration includes all of the aspects of a story and all of the techniques available to the author: the nature of the narrator, the choice of point of view, the roles that the characters play in the plot, the pace at which the narrative proceeds, the setting in which the story takes place, the means of conveying the characterization, the use of dialogue, the structure, the themes that emerge, the tone that the work conveys, and, standing behind the fictional narrative, the authorial voice implied by these various choices.
Voice The narrator of a literary work, of fiction or poetry, is the one who tells the story. He or she may stand outside of the action or partake in it as the PROTAGONIST, a minor character, or
a witness. His or her identity differs from that of the author, because the narrator is always in some sense the author’s invention, one of the devices that he or she is using to shape the narrative. The narrator often differs notably from the author in age, gender, outlook, or circumstances.
Point of view can be identified by the pronoun that the narrator uses to recount events: “I” (or, occasionally, “we” for the plural form) for the first-person; “he,” “she,” or “they” for the third-person; and “you” for the rarely used second-person.
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Dialogue is the presentation of what characters in a literary work say. It is a crucial element of drama, in which, except for stage directions, dialogue makes up the entire text; it is also an important aspect of fiction and of some narrative poetry. Dialogue has several possible uses: to reveal characters’ motives, feelings, values, and relationships; to advance the plot; and to suggest tone—that is, the speaker’s attitude toward the character that he or she is addressing and the narrator’s attitude toward the audience. Dialogue is a primary means of depicting character. Both the style and the content of characters’ words can reveal such qualities as their relative levels of intelligence and refinement, their sense of humor, and their values. The responses of other characters can suggest their relationship, including the level of power relative to each other. In works of fiction, the narrator’s commentary
The setting is the time and place in which the events in a work of fiction, drama, or narrative poetry occur. Individual episodes within a work may have separate, specific settings. For
The structure of a literary work is its basic framework, the principles and the patterns on which it is organized. The structure may derive from the conventions of a certain form—for example, the five-act format of an Elizabethan tragedy or the octave/sestet division of an Italian sonnet. Alternatively, the structure may evolve as an individual work takes shape, creating what the critic and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “organic form.”
In this conception, story refers to the whole series of events and actions that have presumably been involved, listed in their likely order—the raw material for the finished narrative. The plot is the shaping of that material, the selection and ordering of the events and actions to show some pattern of relationship or causation.
Other narratives begin IN MEDIAS RES, not at the chronological start of the story
but at some key point in the middle.
Story vs. Plot To elaborate on the definitions above, the story is a rather straightforward recounting of the events that a reader may infer to have occurred, either before the fictional work begins or between the episodes presented. The plot begins when all of the causative and motivational factors are past, with the midnight appearance of the ghost of old Hamlet to the Danish sentries and their decision to tell the newly arrived prince of the terrifying apparition. To take a twentieth-century example, the story of
Hamilton, Sharon. Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises (Second Edition) (Page 181). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
