2. WriterVivian Gornick explains that there
are two layers to every personal essay:
1. The SITUATION, which is the topic and basic plot of
the essay, the events that the writer is talking about.
2. The STORY, which is the essay’s deeper truth or
meaning.
Identifying the situation and the story of an essay is a
good place to begin analyzing personal essays for their
effects on readers.
3. Let’s analyze the situation and the story of one very short
personal essay, “Excellent Sneakers,” by the recently
deceased Canadian writer Brian Doyle. It’s from his blog
Epiphanies on the site The American Scholar.
”Excellent Sneakers” is only two paragraphs long.Take a
moment to read it – it’s posted under READINGS on the
ENGL 208 – Unit 1 page.
4. Our question for analysis: what is
the “situation” and the “story” of
“Excellent Sneakers”?
5. Let’s start by analyzing the situation of Doyle’s essay
(remember: the basic plot and events of the essay).This
is the easy part – you just need to describe what happens
in the essay.
Situation of “Excellent Sneakers”:
Doyle recounts the beginning of his adolescent friendship with
Jimmy. As young teenagers, they played basketball, and Jimmy
wore old beat-up sneakers with cardboard inserts.They are still
friends many decades later, and Jimmy recounts collecting
cardboard to put in the sneakers, and wishes he’d kept them.
6. OK, but on the surface, that’s pretty mundane.Who cares about
Jimmy and his ratty sneakers, and Doyle’s relationship with him?
To answer that question, we need to dig a little more into the
essay.What’s the STORY here?Why should we care about this
small instance?What truth or insight is revealed?
With that question in mind, I reread the essay, thinking about its
context and looking for clues about its meaning.
7. My first question is “what made this mundane incident worth
writing about for Doyle?” I think about the fact that Doyle is
writing about this adolescent friendship from his contemporary
perspective as a middle-aged man. And he asks Jimmy about
the shoes (”We were talking about basketball the other day”), so
clearly this is a friendship that has lasted for a long time.That in
itself is significant or meaningful (there must be something
good about this friendship – maybe we can learn about what
makes friendships last?).
So what kind of person was Jimmy, and why was he meaningful
then (and now) to Doyle?
8. We can glean several things from the essay about Jimmy as a
young kid:
1. He was kind of a badass, and the young Doyle admired him
(“He had missed the opening two weeks of practive, and
though we had an excellent cocky starting point guard, by
the end of practice Jimmy was the starting point guard.”)
2. He was poor, but resourceful: “when we took our sneakers
off, I noticed that he had layers of thin gray cardboard in his
sneakers. Idly I flipped over his sneakers and noticed serious
holes in the toes and heels.”
9. We can also notice that as an adult, Jimmy doesn’t seem to feel
sorry for himself for growing up poor and in an unconventional
family. Rather, he talks about how living through that time
made him aware of certain ordinary things in a way that most
people aren’t: “I still notice cardboard, I do….It’s not like I think
Hey, I should save those for something, it’s not like that, but some
that, but some part of me notices them and files away the
information, you know what I mean?”
10. So - what’s the story of
“Excellent Sneakers,” then?
While there’s no black and white answer to this, after
carefully reading the essay, I would say that the story
(i.e., the essay’s meaning or significance) might be
how experiences we have when we’re younger affect
for a long time afterward. That’s what I took away,
anyway. Maybe you got something different out of it.
11. Finding the “story” in
essays, then, requires…
1. Careful reading, paying
attention to things like
and place and what details
are included.
2. Asking WHY these particular details are there, as
well as WHY the author might have wanted to write
about this incident. What were they really trying to
convey?
12. Now you try it!You’ll
be analyzing another
Brian Doyle short
personal essay called
“The Compost Heap.”
