Role-Taking

In his essay “Fiction, Why Do We Read it?” new critic Robert Penn Warren compares fiction to a day dream accessible to multiple individuals. It is this accessibility that makes fiction a social experiment of sorts:

“To enter the publicly available day dream you have to surrender something of your own identity, have to let it be absorbed. You must identify yourself with somebody else, and accept his fate. You must take a role.” (4)

A reader may wonder at this point what value there is in surrendering a piece of their identity. After all, it is a piece of us, it is us in a sense. To sacrifice any bit of identity seems to compromise our sense of self. Warren doesn’t think so, however, in fact he believes the opposite:

“Play, when we are children, and fiction, when we are grownup, lead us, through role-taking, to a knowledge of others. But role-taking leads us, by the same token, to a knowledge of ourselves, really to the creation of the self.” (6)

What Warren is saying is that to understand ourselves, we must have something to compare ourselves to, much like the relationship between light and darkness or hot and cold. Our concept of self, however, stems from within, not from perceptive senses like sight or touch. In order to make a comparison of who we are and who others are, we must take the role of someone else. At this point we can start to make statements such as “I’m not as brave as Aragorn” or “I could never fall in love with a vampire.” Comparisons such as these allow us to understand what we are and what we are not as individuals.

This activity asks you to stretch your imagination, surrender part of yourself to fiction, and don the role of tone of the characters we have read about over the course of the past few weeks. First, you will select a character from one of the short stories we have read as a class. Next, you will draw a situation from the ones I have placed in my hat. You then have thirty minutes to respond in prose to the situation as the character would.

Don’t worry about composing perfect prose. The point of this exercise is to immerse ourselves in the fiction and delve into the meaning of character: the personalities portrayed by behavior and thought in prose. Don’t think too hard on this one, once “in character” the response to the situation should be impulsive, so let it out on the page. Feel free to look back over some of the stories or your notes to gain insight into the character.

Post your prose to the course blog and comment on what from the story justified the actions of the character in your scenario. Take some time to look over some of your classmate’s posts. Did anyone choose the same character as you? Do you agree with the actions of their portrayal of the character?

 Reader Response Illustration

One of the interesting things about fiction is that the prose doesn’t tell us everything: we as readers bring our own understandings and imagination to the experience of fiction. Some theorists have come so far as to claim that the meaning of the piece of fiction is not created by the author in the composition process, but rather created by the reader in the interpretation process. While reader response theory focuses largely on theme, the concept of our contribution to the fiction experience can be illustrated by illustrations.

As an experiment into how readers can pull different experiences from the same piece of fiction, today we will be illustrating scenes from one of the three short stories listed below. I have decided upon these three based on enthusiasm in class and the need to compare different illustrations of the same scene. You are to select one of the pieces below and illustrate the scene that you feel is most important to the theme or meaning of the piece.

Be creative! This experiment is designed to delve into our subjective interpretations, so there is no “wrong” illustration. You have 45 minutes to re-read the scene of your selection and create a visual representation of what you “see” when you read it. Don’t be afraid to embellish and add things that you imagine are there but may not be depicted in the prose.

Once the illustrations are finished, we will compare illustrations from each piece, so be prepared to explain how you came about illustrating the scene as you have.