Below is a list of most important actions in the story. Place them in the part of the story you think they best fit.

A Bag of Oranges

The aim of the lesson is to see the essence of conflict while analyzing a short story.

1. Pronunciation drill + matching.

to ripen to tease smb. to stoop over to show the least bit of oneself to giggle to blush to slip up to ooze to keep up with smb. to plead to steal up behind smb.

to become red in the face to laugh lightly in nervous or silly way to become ready to be gathered to bend forward and down to come or flow out slowly to offer sth as an explanation or excuse to try to provoke smb. in a playful and unkind way to make a part of smb’s body available to see to make a careless mistake to move or progress at the same rate as smb. to move up quietly behind smb.

2. Reproduce the sentences paraphrasing the italicized word combinations.

1) The city market was crowded.

2) Skip stepping, the ten-year-old tried to keep up with his father’s long stride.

3) He seemed to delight in making cars stop to let him pass.

4) The young man stared after him, his mouth still open, rubbing his wrist briskly.

5) And the boy was delighted to be his father’s monkey again.

6) He felt a sudden chill, an inner void; and he began to run.

7) The boy nodded and his mother smiled her approval.

8) He could make nothing out of what he saw in the street.

9) He had made up his mind to run down to the corner.

10) In the middle of the next block he caught up with the young man who had picked up the orange.

11) Of a sudden a young man broke from the crowd and picked up the orange near the corner.

3. Sum up the given information and add a few sentences dwelling on the nature of the short story.

Like all fiction, the short story is a narrative of certain events (psychic and physical) which involves a significant conflict and resolution and leads us to ponder its comment on human feelings, conduct and beliefs. But it is a short story, and the fact of its length has produced in it a set of traditions and conventions that give certain distinguishing characteristics such as.....

4. A short story the length of “A Bag of Oranges” is one uninterrupted narrative. It’s short but it includes many events. Some of them seem to happen suddenly and some don’t seem closely related to the main action. The story moves from one scene to the next without any formal divisions. Yet any short story can usually be divided into 5 parts:

(a) the presentation of the situation

(b) a difficulty or difficulties in the situation (entanglement)

(c) the most difficult or critical moment (climax)

(d) the withdrawal from the situation

(e) the resolution (denouement)

Below is a list of most important actions in the story. Place them in the part of the story you think they best fit.

ü Stavro bargains with the strawberry seller.

ü The father, Stavro, leaves to get a haircut.

ü The oranges drop and roll down thebus aisle.

ü The boy holds on to his father as they arrive home.

ü On the bus, Stavro squeezes the hand of a man who caught one of the rolling oranges.

ü Father and son sit in the coffeehouse together.

ü Nikos sits alone with his mother in the kitchen after his father has left.

ü Nikos chases the man who took the oranges Viki had dropped.

ü Viki returns home and tells Nikos she saw her father lying in the street.

ü Nikos brings in the trash cans from the street.

5. SUBPLOT & MAIN PLOT

In this story a subplot complements the main story. The subplot in "A Bag of Oranges" consists of only a very short scene in the coffee­house near the market. Stavro and Nikos, father and son, are there, but so are other characters who appear only in this scene. The sentences in the left column below are reproduced from this scene; those in the right column are reproduced from other sections of the story. The sentences on the left (from the subplot) contain ideas, feel­ings, or images that reinforce or support those on the right (from other sections of the story). Match each sentence on the left with the one it supports on the right, explain your reasons for matching the subplot and main plot items.

Subplot	Main plot
Stavro sat like a rock with his legs corralling the four brimming cloth sacks.	The boy's father finished his coffee in one long swallow and pushed himself up heavily.
In the coffeehouse the boy sat on a corner of his father's chair	“So it's black coffee is it; a man's drink.”...He sipped. It was bitter, the price of being a man.
“Michales is dying, you know.”	The boy sat in his father's chair sipping the thick coffee; both had lost their warmth.
The boy enjoyed the talk and sometimes felt he was being allowed to hear all the secrets of the world, and was only mildly frustrated by the mysteries he could not understand.	A neighbor, an old woman, noticed the boy and made a comforting gesture, a movement toward him. Seeing this, Nikos began to run, past the woman and the corner.
“Old ladies, all of you. Gossiping old ladies,”	“Then I saw Poppa. He wasn't bleeding. He looked okay. Like he was asleep.”

CHARACTERS

Character can answer many questions raised by structure and so fulfills the promise structure offers. One way to understand character, to get a true sense of what is important to a particular character, what actions are typical of him or her, and how she or he interacts with other characters, is to ask yourself to which charac­ter you feel closest. To feel something in common with or to identify with means to understand the character well enough to sympathize with and even to imagine yourself as the character in his or her situation. For example, do you feel some of what Nikos Pappanoulos feels toward his father? What character do you identify with and why?

I identify with………because…………………

You will find below a list of all the characters. Some of them have more in common than others. Arrange the characters below in groups based on what they have in common. Who belongs most with whom and why? A charac­ter may belong to more than one group. A group may contain more than two char­acters. Create as many groups as there are relationships among characters.

The Characters: Stavro (father), mother, Nikos (son), Viki (daughter), Aphrodite ("aunt"), old Albanian, Peter Pappas (Stavro’s brothet - young man on the bus, Michales.

Model:

Nikos and the young man on the bus:

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