Possible Focuses of the Narrative Essay

ENGL 1301

Miles

Possible Focuses of the Narrative Essay:

• Moments of Enlightenment or coming to knowledge – understanding a complex idea for the first time, recognizing what is meant by love or jealousy or justice, mastering a complex skill, seeing some truth about yourself or your family that you previously hadn’t seen.
• Passages from one realm to the next – from innocence to experience, from outsider to insider or vice versa, from child to adult, from novice to expert, from what you once were to what you now are.
• Confrontation with the unknown – with people or situations that challenged or threatened your old identity and values
• Moments of Crisis or critical choice – moments that tested your mettle or your system of values
• Major choices – about the company you keep (friends, love interests, cliques, larger social groups) and the effects of those choices on your integrity and the persona you project to the world
• Problems with people – problems with maintaining relationships without compromising your own growth or denying your own needs
• Problems accepting limitations or necessities – confronting the loss of dreams, the death of intimates, the failure to live up to ideals, or the difficulty of living with a chronic illness or disability
• Contrasts between common wisdom and your own unique knowledge and experience – doing what people said shouldn’t be done, failing at something others said was easy, finding value in something rejected by society, finding bad consequences of something widely valued