English Literature 1st Year Unit 1: The Short Story
Francis
Before reading the short story, let’s learn a bit about the author, Dave Eggers.
Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher.
He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a
literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human
rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program
that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing
has appeared in several magazines.
1 In small groups, read the first part of the story and answer:
● What will the story be about? Love, tragedy, comedy…?
● What do you think happened to Francis Brandywine?
2 Read the rest of the story. ⚠️BEWARE: The last paragraph will not be there.⚠️
3 Now, imagine how the story ends. Write a short paragraph with the ending of the story.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
4 Let’s watch the short film based on this story now. Sit back and enjoy!
1
English Literature 1st Year Unit 1: The Short Story
Francis by Dave Eggers
When I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago, adventure meant Quetico Provincial Park, up
on the border of Minnesota and Canada. The name implies that the place was small, but Quetico
is a million acre nature preserve, so big you could go days and days without seeing another soul.
We would go on camping trips up there, weeks of canoeing and portaging, seeing bears and
moose and deer, sleeping under star-soaked skies. The park was isolated and so pristine that you
could actually drink the water straight from the lakes. But I won't be going back to Quetico
anytime soon. Not after what happened to a girl name Francis Brandywine.
Francis was 17 at the time, black haired and with a reckless nature, determined always to
leave the well-trod path, to break new ground and be alone. A few years ago, Francis was up in
Quetico with her family. They were in a remote part of the park, camped on the shore of one of the
deeper lakes, a lonely body of water carved millions of years ago by a passing glacier. The deep
part of this particular lake was rumored to be about 300 feet.
One night, after her family went to bed, Francis took the row boat out, planning to find a
quiet spot in the middle of the lake, lay on the bench of the boat, look up at the sky, and maybe
write in her journal.
So she left the shore, rowed for about 20 minutes, and when she felt satisfied that she was
over the lake's deepest spot, she lay down on the bench and looked up at the night sky. The stars
were very bright, and the aurora borealis was shimmering like a neon lasso. She was feeling very
peaceful.
Then she heard something strange. It was like a knock. Clop, clop. She sat up, guessing that
the boat had drifted to shore and run aground. But she looked around the boat, and she was still a
half mile from shore. She leaned over the side to see if she'd hit anything, but she saw nothing--
no log, no rocks. She lay back down.
She told herself it could be any number of things, a fish, a turtle, a stick that had drifted
under the boat. She relaxed again and soon fell into a contented reverie. She had just closed her
eyes when she heard another knock. This time it was louder, a crisp plop, plop, plop, like the
sound of someone knocking hard on a wooden door, except this knocking was coming from the
bottom of the boat.
2
English Literature 1st Year Unit 1: The Short Story
Now she was scared. She leaned over the side again. It had to be an animal. But what kind
of animal would knock like that, three quick, loud knocks in rapid succession? Her mouth went
dry. She held onto each side of the boat, and now she could only wait to see if it happened again.
The silence stretched out. A few minutes passed, and just as she began to think she'd imagined it
all, the knocks came again, but this time louder. Bam, bam, bam.
She had to leave. She lunged for the oars. She got them in place and began rowing. The
water was very calm, so she should've made quick progress. But after rowing feverishly,
she looked around, and she realized that she wasn't moving at all. Something was keeping
her exactly where she was.
Again she tried rowing, she rowed and rowed on the verge of tears, but she went nowhere.
She stopped. She was exhausted. Her heavy breathing filled the air. She cried. She sobbed.
But soon she calmed herself again, and the boat was silent again, for 10 minutes, then 20.
Again, she tricked herself into thinking she'd imagined it all. But just like before, just when
she was beginning to get a grip on herself, the knocking came again, this time as loud as a bass
drum. Boom, boom, boom. The floorboards of the boat shook with each knock. Now she was so
shaken she started making questionable decisions. The first was to lower one of the oars into the
black water, trying to feel if there was some land mass, even some creature she could touch. As
soon as the oar broke the water's surface, though, she felt a strong, silent tug at the other end, and
the oar was pulled under.
She screamed, she jumped back, and now she had no options. All she could do was sit, and
hope, and wait-- wait for the morning to come, wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.
The knocking went on through the night. She passed the time writing in her notebook, and it's
only because of this notebook that we know what happened that night. Frances can't tell us. She
was never seen again.
The boat was found on shore the next day, empty but for the journal…
3
English Literature 1st Year Unit 1: The Short Story
…On those pages were her frantic jottings, all written in her distinctive handwriting, all but the
last page. When the journal was found, that page was still wet, and on it were four words, looking
as if they'd been written quickly, with a muddy finger. They said, "I did knock first."
After reading the story, let’s discuss the following concepts and terms:
● open-ending vs closed-ending
● denouement (also called ‘resolution’)
● thought-provoking
● reader’s involvement
● man vs nature
Let’s get creative! Choose ONE of the following activities:
1. Imagine you are the entity who wrote the last page of the journal. Write one or two small paragraphs about
what happened that day.
2. Imagine you are a member of Francis’ family. Write one or two short paragraphs describing the morning
you found the boat and your ideas about what happened to her.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
4
English Literature 1st Year Unit 1: The Short Story
The Short Story
What is a short story?
How did it originate?
The origin of the short story can be traced back to the oral story-telling tradition. The publication of the brothers
Grimm fairy tales is an important moment in the development of the short story as a genre. Then, Edgar Allen Poe’s
gothic fiction became important in the field.
Who was Edgar Allen Poe?
Edgar Allen Poe (1809 –1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary
critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery
and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United
States, and of American Literature. He was one of the country's earliest practitioners of
the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a
significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.
How did he contribute to the short story genre?
Poe wrote more than seventy short stories and created his own set of rules for the
genre. The author created an influential theory of “unity of effect”. This theory states
that the author of a short story should construct a tale to fit one overall purpose or effect
(for example: horror). This means that the whole short story is written in order to
provoke a specific response on its reader.
Now, let’s read about the major fictional elements of a story. They are:
● setting
● plot
● character
● theme
● point of view
For the purpose of making your lives easier, today we are going to be discussing setting and plot only.
5
English Literature 1st Year Unit 1: The Short Story
Setting
It is mostly, the time and location in which a story takes place. For some stories, the setting is very important; while
for others, it is not. When examining how setting contributes to a story, there are multiple aspects to consider:
a. Place - Geographical location; where is the action of the story taking place?
b. Time - Historical period, time of day, year, etc; when is the story taking place?
c. Weather conditions - Is it rainy, sunny, stormy, etc? This contributes to point d.
d. Mood or atmosphere - What feeling is created at the beginning of the story? Cheerful or eerie?
Plot
It is how the author arranges events to develop the basic idea of
the story. The plot is a planned, logical sequence of events having
a beginning, a middle, and an end. The short story usually has one
plot so it can be read in one sitting. There are five essential parts to
a plot which constitute the dramatic structure of the story.
Novelist Gustav Freytag developed a narrative pyramid in the 19th
century as a description of a structure fiction writers had used for
millennia. Take a look at it:
Match each literary concept with its explanation. Then, think about Francis: can you identify the moments in which
each of these concepts occur/are described?
