Short Stories for High School: Focus on Characterization
Welcome back to our series featuring our favorite short stories for high school students! Last week, we looked at four texts we found effective in teaching plot structure; today, we’re focusing on three engaging texts to help students focus on characterization in short stories.
Characterization is one of the most important literary devices you can focus on with your students. Really, at its heart, characterization is the point of literature. Whether we’re reading to escape, to learn, to feel, or to experience, well-developed characters are essential. Books are most powerful when they evoke strong feelings in us, and the more real a character feels, the more likely we are to have these strong feelings.
On a more practical note, characterization is something our students will encounter in future literature classes, and it’s tested on the SAT, ACT, and AP Literature exam. Being able to describe characters and support those descriptions with evidence from the text is a skill that will serve students well on many essays (and if you’re looking for a ready-made character analysis assignment, we’ve got you covered).
Knowing terms like protagonist, antagonist, flat and round character, static and dynamic character, and stock character will absolutely give students essential tools in their role as literary scholars. (And the tendency of high school seniors to mix up flat, round, static, and dynamic tells us these are not terms you’re introduced to once and then remember forever!)
Interesting Characterization in Short Stories
One story we taught every year in AP Literature was Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow” (1981). The engaging, accessible story describes a hunting trip between three “friends” (we use that term very loosely) who could not be more selfish and lacking in compassion if they tried.
While the beginning of the story sets the audience up to empathize with the bullied Tub, we come to realize that the three men’s friendship is grounded in years of codependent and manipulative behavior, and by the end, we’re not fond of any of them.
Students enjoy the story, and there is no shortage of details they can pull from to build character descriptions of Frank, Kenny, and Tub. But what makes this text really work in a high school classroom is the way students take it at face value, seeing kindness and empathy in actions that if you scratch just beneath surface level are really cruel and manipulative. We’ve had many rich discussions with students about what this text really shows about human nature and what it truly means to be a friend.
Another story that works well for addressing character with high school students is Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” (1983). Carver creates three richly-developed characters, and there is ample material for students to work with in their character analyses. The story is engaging and accessible, but there are many nuances students tend not to pick up on during a first read, which makes for meaningful class discussion.
The story’s protagonist has a clear epiphany at the end of the text, making him a textbook example of a dynamic character, but the drug-hazed circumstances of his epiphany allow for interesting discussions about the degree to which he truly changes and the degree to which a character must change in order to be characterized as dynamic. The story also contains a few key symbols that are relatively accessible to beginning literary scholars, making this a great text to use toward the beginning of the year in a PreAP/honors or AP Literature course.
For our standard-level students, our most successful short story for focusing on characterization was Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Catch the Moon” (1995). The story brings us into the life of Luis Cintrón, a teenager who struggles to stay out of trouble with his father and at school after his mother dies. He meets a beautiful girl named Naomi while working at his father’s junkyard, and their interactions help him to finally grieve his mother’s death, leaving us with hope that he is ready to reconcile with his father and move on to a happier future.
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Students find the story relatable and accessible, allowing us to focus on character analysis rather than simply reading comprehension. In last week’s blog post, we mentioned that we often address plot and character together with these students: this is the story we use most often to address both sets of literary devices.
Fortunately, pretty much any good story allows for fruitful discussion of characterization, but these three are our favorites when it comes to short texts. What stories have you loved using to teach characterization in your classroom? Share with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.
