This assignment asks you to think about how a text tells its story as well as the content of that story. It will, therefore, ask you to make a claim about some element of the story, to point to formal and thematic evidence that justify those claims, and to explain how that evidence supports those claims. A claim is an assertion about a work of art that you believe to be correct but cannot be proven definitively one way or another. If it could be proven definitively, then it would be an observation. A claim is an expression of what you think, what you take a difficult or complex moment to mean, how you think an obscure passage should be understood.

The paper must be about a claim from the novel The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and supporting quotes are required from the novel (PDF file of novel attached – you may use LitCharts for summaries and whatnot).