The second pass through longer fiction and drama in the AP Lit course, deepening Unit 3's introduction with greater structural and narrative complexity.
The degree of control a character has over their own choices and the course of events. Texts often explore the tension between agency and forces like fate, society, or circumstance.
A character's agency limited by external forces — social class, law, family obligation, or circumstance — even when the character actively tries to exercise choice.
A scene that interrupts the present action to depict an earlier event. In longer works, flashbacks can recur and accumulate, gradually recontextualizing the present.
A hint or clue that suggests events to come. In longer works, foreshadowing can be subtle and distributed across many chapters, rewarding readers who track patterns over time.
A device related to foreshadowing in which the audience knows something a character does not, creating tension as the reader anticipates a revelation the character hasn't reached.
Latin for "into the middle of things" — a narrative technique that begins a story in the middle of action, often requiring later exposition to fill in context.
Exposition is background information about characters, setting, or events. A frame narrative encloses one story within another, often paired with in medias res or flashback structures.
A narrator whose credibility is compromised by bias, self-interest, limited knowledge, denial, or deception, requiring readers to interpret events critically rather than at face value.
A specific type of unreliable narrator whose limited understanding — often due to youth or inexperience — causes them to misinterpret events the reader can see more clearly.
Moments where a narrator omits, glosses over, or contradicts information, often signaling unreliability. Readers must read across these gaps to reconstruct a fuller picture of events.
A thesis statement that accounts for tension, contradiction, or complication in a text, rather than asserting a single, simple claim.
Words and phrases (such as "ultimately," "despite," or "though") used in a thesis to show awareness of complexity or counterargument, strengthening a claim's sophistication.
A counterargument is an alternative interpretation a writer acknowledges within an essay. Nuance is a subtle distinction that resists oversimplified claims.
Any technique — flashback, foreshadowing, in medias res, frame narrative — that alters the straightforward, chronological telling of events to control what the reader knows and when.
The character, force, or institution that opposes the protagonist's agency. In longer works, an antagonist can be a person, a social system, or even fate itself.
The Big Idea covering how a writer builds a credible, evidence-based interpretation of a text — extended in Unit 6 to require theses sophisticated enough to address complexity.
The analytical explanation that connects evidence back to a thesis, telling the reader why the evidence matters — especially important when a thesis is complex and requires nuanced support.
A turning point in a longer work where conflict escalates, agency is tested, or a structural device like flashback or foreshadowing delivers its full significance.