Reading Novels Like A Professor: Chapter 1 – Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions,...

Reading Novels Like A Professor: Chapter 1 – Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions,...: "Analyze the opening few pages of your novel using some of the eighteen elements Foster identifies and discusses on pgs. 25-34. Be sure to us..."

In Thomas Foster’s, How to Read Novels like a Professor, he discusses eighteen attributes that readers should look for when unfolding the first pages of any book that they read. These attributes pertain to the tone of the book, the specific writing style of the author, the mood that is set in place, and several other key elements that the reader must be on the lookout for. Within the first few pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, several of the attributes are addressed. The author begins the book by quickly describing the setting as, “AN EXCEPTIONALLY HOT evening early in July” (5), then immediately rushes into the whereabouts on the main character that has yet to be properly introduced. The writing style switches back and forth from short sentences of quick description, “His closet of a room was under the roof of a high, five-floor house and was more like a cupboard then a place in which to live” (5), to longer sentences where the description in more detailed, “This was not because he was cowardly and browbeaten, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria” (5). The narration is written in third person and the story is being told by an unnamed omniscient apparition who is probably just the author. The mood is set up by the author to be very sympathetic towards the main character due to his lack of funds and other finance troubles. Although the reader is very aware of whom the main character is, his exact motives and intentions are very unclear. This is simply because they are even unclear to the main character himself, “The young man did not dispute it and took the money. He looked at the old woman, and was in no hurry to get away, as though there was still something he wanted to say or do, but he did not himself quite know what”(11). At this point the novel is setting up to be an unpredictable journey for the reader as well as the characters.

-Conner Furr