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(These are designed for those moments when you're not certain how to get beyond a novel's incidents. We've tried to order them so each one builds on the ones preceding it.)

A. Questions of character: What do characters represent and what function they fulfill?

• 1. Characters are not real people, even though one sign of a good novel is when we care about its characters as if they were. All the same, step back for a moment and look at the characters as the constructed creations of an author who has things to say -- as simultaneously "examples" and exemplary of ideas, classes, value systems, or world views. Why do you think that the author has created the characters in this particular novel exactly they are? Could they have been a different sex? religion? race? class? profession? temperament? What does constructing a character in a given way allow the author to say?

• 2. Related to Question #1, ask yourself whether characters in this novel are defined allegorically (as standing in for a single, specific idea) or socially (as embodying more complex ideas always in relation to, or in conflict with, other points of view -- but nevertheless as complexly defined by their relations to other characters). If a given novel is a case of the former, then what is the allegory being told to us? If the latter, then how do the traits and situation of one particular character help to define other characters? If both, where is it one and where the other?

B. Questions of Plot: What other stories does the story tell?

• 3. First, a simple question: by telling this particular story, what questions does the author get to ask? what issues raise? If the story we're being told is in many ways familiar -- i.e., a conventional story taken from a previous novel and adapted for different purposes in the present one -- how does the adaptation amount to an interpretation of its source story?

• 4. Second, how about the part of the novel not essential to the plot? All novels may bring with them the demands of plot and story, but they also talk about many other things as well on the way. Since authors often tell stories to make arguments -- which means that how the stories are told matters as much as (or more than) what stories are told -- it is often in the parts of the novel not essential to the plot that novels argue most stringently. With these issues in mind, what "happens" in this novel besides the plot? How and why do these things "happen" in the ways that they do?

C. Questions of Narrator and Audience: Who is speaking and to whom?

• 5. Audience: Mikhail Bakhtin argued in an essay called "On Speech Genres" that every genre choice presupposes an audience choice. In other words (for the purposes of our course), that what kind of novel you choose to write says much about what parts of the novel-reading audience you wish to reach. At what points in this novel do you become particularly aware of audience? How would you describe that audience's demographic makeup? When to you feel that you are or (more interestingly) are not the audience? that the author is speaking to a very particular audience? or appears to be speaking to one audience but is really speaking to another? Can you connect these moments to specific ideological projects in the novel?

• 6. What happens when the narrator is a character?: We've all been taught that the speaker of a poem is not the same as the author of that poem -- i.e., that writers can speak in "character." Similarly, just because a character expresses an opinion in a novel doesn't mean that the author holds that same viewpoint. Who is the narrator in your novel? If the narrator is a character, how do you then know where the author stands?

• 7. Finally (and perhaps most important): In cases where the narrator of a novel is not a character: What happens when you refrain from equating the narrator and the author? Can authors dislike or distrust their narrators, or even like their narrators but find them unreliable? Put another way: Does your author dupe you at certain points by having the narrator say things that you find out later to be wrong? Does it become easier to distrust a narrator when you've read other novels by the same author that make different claims? In this particular novel, then, where do you find the narrator and the narration most suspicious?