Final Reflective Essay

This entire semester in American literature after 1865 has been a continual

growing experience. Now that I have completed the course it is encouraging to see how Ive

matured as a writer as well as a thinker. When I first began this course I had trouble being an

intentional reader. I was glossing over the story and taking everything I read for face value. I

didnt pay attention to the style of narration and I had no strategy for how to look at a story in a

different light that might help me discern the about-ness of the story that a reader may not

have thought about. This is very clear in some of my early writings as I am often blindly

searching for some deeper meaning that may or may not be there. However, as the course

progressed and we started discussing how the type of narration can influence the readers

perception of the story and how to use a lens to look at a story in a way that may seem less

obvious to a reader, I began to improve as a critical thinker. I believe this growth is reflected in

the articles that I have chosen for this eportfolio assignment.

The biggest indicator of my growth in this class has been in the improvement of my daily

work. There is a very clear day to day progression of my thinking from assignment to

assignment. The prompts were very helpful in giving me direction in how to improve my way of

thinking about each story. I look back at our first daily writing assignment in this class Three

American Writers on the Civil War, and I almost cringe. I used terms like omniscient observer

to describe the style of narration and I am clearly searching for some meaning about how the

story of the boy in Chickamauga, parallels with the plight of mankind and their attraction to

war. It is in The Golden Honeymoon, where I finally understand how the style of narration can

influence the story. The Golden Honeymoon, is the first story we read that incorporates a
homodiegetic narrator and this shift from the heterodiegetic narrators that I was used to

helped me realize how important the style of narration is to the telling of the story. The impact

of the style of narration can not only be felt in works of fiction, but often times the type of

rhetoric an orator uses can also influence how an audience perceives their message. I

particularly liked reading Up from Slavery, and the assignment surrounding it because it

allowed me to take what weve learned from reading works of fiction and apply it to a real word

scenario. In order to really understand why Booker T. Washington uses the rhetoric he does in

his autobiography I had to look more into his life and his motivations as to why he became such

a prominent civil rights figure.

As we progressed through the semester we began to move away from talking about the

style of narration and started focusing on how to look at a story through one of our four

lenses, human nature, nature, community and society. This was challenging because often

times the most obvious lens didnt always present the best argument or interpretation of the

story. This took some time for me to grasp and at times I found myself struggling to look

through a less obvious lens and develop and argument, as is the case in The Evening Sun. As I

look back at my daily writing assignment from this story, I often find myself flipping back and

forth between community and human nature unable to commit to one or the other. However, I

can see myself improving in this area in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, because

even though nature may be the most obvious choice of lens for this story I focused in more on

how relationships between humans affects their relationship with nature. In Notes of a Native

Son, I do a better job narrowing my argument down to one lens as I use how the main

characters relationship with his father and the institutions of his society influence his nature.
By the time we read Revelation, I have firmly grasped the concept of using lenses to develop

an argument for a story by focusing on how human nature plays a role in the understanding of

the story.

While the daily writing assignments showed my day-to-day progression as a writer and

thinker, the essay assignments forced me to develop an argument and back It up with evidence

on a much larger scale. The first essay and the assignments leading up to it were instrumental

to my development in the course because the process driven approach to drafting and writing

this essay laid the groundwork for how I would structure my essays going forward. Having a

plan, generating ideas, and developing a thesis allowed me to organize my thoughts and form a

more coherent argument than previous essays I had written. The first essay, which I had chosen

to write about The Apostate, built on the work we had done up to that point with

determining how the style of narration influences our understanding of the story. In it I argue

that the monofocal heterodiegetic narration allows us to empathize with the struggles of the

main character as we know what his true thoughts and feelings are when other characters in

the story are questioning a major decision he makes. If it were another style of narration, like

multifocal narration, we may see through our ability to look in multiple different characters

points of view, how their reactions to the decision the main character makes may be justified. I

believe this shows a firm grasp of my ability do determine the type of narration and how it

influences the story.

The last major essay assignment shows depth of my growth in this course. In this essay

we are charged with using a lens other than the one most obvious than the one an uninformed

reader might use to argue the about-ness of the story. In writing about The Bog Girl, I showed
how while the story may seem to be about the nature of relationships its really about how the

communitys culture and superstitions change their response to a strange relationship. This

assignment brings together everything weve covered in this course, such as the rhetoric of

narration, the exploration of lenses, and arguing about-ness to form one coherent argument. I

believe that in this assignment I showed not only do I have a firm grasp of the concepts weve

covered in this course, but that I have also retained the information and that I am able to bring

it all together to form an argument.

My experience in American literature after 1865 was one of constant growth until the

very end. I am extremely happy with the way I have matured as both a writer and a critical

thinker. The lessons learned in this course such as how the style of narration can influence the

way a reader perceives the story, how to look through a lens to present an argument about the

story, as well as how to argue the about-ness of a story, allowed me to look deeper into the

works we were reading rather than taking the words for face value. This is reflected in the day-

to-day progress of my thinking in my daily writing assignments, as well as the essay assignments

on a much larger scale. I am confident that what I have learned in this course will help me to be

a more critical thinker in any of my future endeavors.