Download Literary Terms – Short Story Unit

Literary Terms – Short
Story Unit
Protagonist and Antagonist
– the main character; usually
the hero of the story, or the character you
pull for
 Protagonist
– the bad guy; the villain in a
story. Can also be a negative force or
power, like poverty or greed
 Antagonist
Static and Dynamic Characters
Character – a character in the story
who never changes
 Static
Beginning of the story – End of the story

Dynamic Character – a character who does go
through an emotional change in the story
Beginning of the story – End of the story
Setting
– the time(when) and
place(where) of a story.
 Setting
Internal and External Conflict
Conflict – conflict or problem
exists inside the mind of a character
 Internal

Man vs. Self –
Conflict – character struggles
against an outside force
 External



Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Society
Dialogue
 Conversation
characters
between two or more
Narrator
 The
person who is telling the story
Flashback
– recalling or remembering
events that happened before the
beginning of the story
 Flashback
Irony

When something happens that is very
contradictory to what you would expect to
happen
Types Of Irony

Verbal Irony(Sarcasm)



when someone says
something but does
not mean what they
say
EX: “I really love my
brother” (when you
have been arguing all
day)
Irony of Situation


Dramatic Irony

When we (the
audience/reader)
knows something that
the characters do not
know
EX: In a movie when a
character is about to
walk into the room
where the bad guy is
When what we expect to happen is not actually
what happens
Ex: rain on a wedding day, when a character in a
movie dies that you thought would live
Theme
 The
main idea or message of a short
story, novel, poem, or play
Characterization
 The
way an author brings a character to
life – through physical description, their
actions, and through revealing their
thoughts or feelings
Plot
– the sequence of events in a story –
the order in which things happen
 Plot
Point of View

POV- The particular perspective from which a
story is told
 1st Person- one of the characters tells the story
using I or we, narrator is part of the story
 Third- Person Limited- when an unknown
narrator tells the story, usually only gives us the
inner thoughts and feelings of one character
 Third-Person Omniscient- when an “all-knowing”
narrator tells the story, usually gives us the
thoughts and feelings of all characters