Compose a three- to five-page essay using one of the following questions:
1. As Henry James sees it, characters are only as interesting as their responses to particular situations. Explain how in each of two works of fiction, either assigned or unassigned (from text or other source), a particular character communicates to us his reaction to a situation, and what effect that reaction is apparently intended to have on the reader.
2. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner identified “the human heart in conflict with itself” as the only subject truly worth writing about. Discuss how in two pieces of fiction, either assigned or unassigned (from text or other source), we become witnesses to a character’s struggle with himself and what the outcome of that struggle reveals about the character.