Unit 4 · Short Fiction II

Protagonist ● (core concept) — The main character in a narrative.

Antagonist ● (core concept) — Whatever stands opposed to the protagonist: another character, the protagonist's own inner conflicts, a collective such as society, or nature itself. Protagonist and antagonist often embody contrasting values.

Agency ○ — A character's capacity to act and to make choices that matter. The CED notes that a character's significance often shows itself through their agency and through richly nuanced description. (Named in CHR-1.O; not further defined.)

Soliloquy ○ — A speech in a drama in which a character voices their thoughts aloud, usually alone on stage. The Unit 4 'Preparing for the AP Exam' uses Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' soliloquy as an example of conflicting perspectives and motives revealed through contrasting ideas and images.

Mood ● (core concept) — The emotional quality a text creates in its reader — which setting details can help establish.

Atmosphere ● (core concept) — The pervasive feeling or emotional tone of a scene or narrative, often built up through details of setting.

Archetype ○ — A story-pattern so overused it feels preinstalled — carrying built-in expectations about how such situations will go and end. NOTE: the CED states twice that the AP Exam will not ask students to identify or label archetypes.

Narrative distance ● (core concept) — The gap — physical, chronological, relational, or emotional — between a narrator and the events and characters being narrated.

Stream of consciousness ● (core concept) — A narrative mode that presents a character's thinking directly, as one continuous stream of inner speech or description. It is also one of the structures that can break a plot's chronological order.

Tone ● (core concept) — How a narrator, character, or speaker feels about — and signals feeling toward — an idea, character, or situation. It grows out of their perspective and background, and it steers how readers interpret the ideas attached to what is described.

Diction ○ — A writer's choice of words. The CED examines diction through 'descriptive words' — adjectives and adverbs that qualify what they describe while also conveying a perspective toward it. (Named in skill 4.C and EKs NAR-1.N, FIG-1.M; never defined as a standalone term.)

Topic sentence ● (core concept) — A sentence in a body paragraph that states the paragraph's claim and signals the reasoning connecting the paragraph's claims and evidence.

Coherence ● (core concept) — The logical linking of ideas at every level of an essay: clause to clause, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. Writers achieve it through logical arrangement and through transitions, repetition, synonyms, pronoun references, and parallel structure.