Story Analysis

1. To analyze a short story, the reader needs to think of the following:

When? (Time of the story)
Where? (Place of the story)
Who? (Characters: main & secondary)
What? (Plot: problem/conflict, rising action, crisis/climax, falling action, resolution)
Why? (Theme: what the idea behind the story is; why the author wrote this story)
How? (Point of view: who tells the story and how)

Complete the chart, analyzing the story, “Eleven”.

2. Summarize the story in your own words. This means you must write out the events of the story in the order they happen chronologically.

3. Describe the protagonist (the chief/main character) in the story. Write between 1 – 2 paragraphs.

4. a. Draw the simile Rachel uses in the story to describe what it is like to grow up.

b. Then explain what she means in your own words.

Here is the simile:

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree

trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the

next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

Source: ETNI – English Teachers’ Network

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