Toai Tran-Plot Summary

Exposition

James Calley, an American war correspondent during 1960s, visits Cambodia and proposes his idea of illegally crossing the borders to Viet Nam to a daring journalist, Chantou Chey. After being convinced by James, Chantou contacts her cousin’s friend, Phirun, who is a drug dealer, to guide them on the trip.

Inciting Incident

As Phirun making a drug deal with his gang, James and Chantou stop by a cheap motel to wait for the day they get to Sai Gon (a city in Southern Viet Nam)

Rising Action

Phirun returns, frightened and exhausted, telling James and Chantou to get out of the motel as soon as possible. They sneak into a van trunk as Phirun drive them to a safer place. It turns out that Phirun has stolen quite a lot of money from the gang, and once again the group has to run as fast as they can into a vast paddy field.

Climax

Here, they experience the most terrific and frightening moment of their life. The paddy field is a grave of all the injustice dead souls of the Ba Chuc Massacre took place in An Giang during the Viet Nam War. The boundary between life and death, justice and crime, has been shifted in a tick of time.

Falling Action

James Calley makes it out to the highway and passes out.

Dénouement

James Calley awakes in a hospital with Dr. Jenkins beside. He’s trying to look for Chantou and Phirun in an attempt of remembering what happened that night. Unfortunately, all around him is a bunch of mental patients crawling and screaming. The story ends as James runs out of the hospital, and looks up at the banner “The Boston Psychiatric Hospital”. It is now revealed that James Calley is a patient with post-traumatic stress disorder caused when he was a war correspondent during the Viet Nam War. The trip in James’s hallucination is the haunted memory when he eye-witnessed the shocking massacre in the war.

Wendy Li- Plot Summary

Oh this is going to be embarrassing... T_T  Something like this, I'll go more into detail if I find the time to write the story.

1.      Exposition: A boy is walking in the woods when he spies a white house and a man working there.  He is startled when the man notices him and runs away.  The main characters, the boy (unnamed) and the Paper man are revealed.  The setting is set during fall and progresses through winter, spring and summer.  

Rising action:  Later on the boy approaches the paper man and greets him.  They begin to interact with each other.  A relationship develops between the boy and man; however, one day he sees that the man has lost an arm.  The boy breaks down and the next day comes towards the forest with a torch in his hand.

Climax:  The boy sets the forest on fire and the Paper man and his house disappears along with it.

Falling action: The boy is last seen walking away into the forest

Denouément: The Paper man and his house is actually the boy’s soul.  Although the place he lives in is beautiful, underneath the ideal setting lies an environment that’s hostile.  His soul is defective and becomes even more damaged as the story progresses, the Paper man’s eyes and arm being a reflection of the damage.  In order to reveal what his environment is really like, the boy burns the forest as an attempt to turn his ideal world into an ugly one.  As an attempt to reveal the truth, he also loses himself in the process. He walks away from the burning forest leaving his future unknown.

Update to Spring Break Homework and Short Story Proposals

Post plot summary to this blog: Recommended by 4/17; mandatory by 4/20
Comment on at least two posts: Mandatory by 4/20
Full proposals turned in to me in hard copy form: mandatory by 4/20

For complete instructions, click on the "Short Story Proposals" page on the side bar.

--Ms. Mason

Welcome to Ms. Mason's 4th Period Blog

Welcome all!

We will be using this blog to share our writing and our thoughts on the texts we read in class. Over spring break, you will write a detailed proposal for your short story. In the coming days, I'll give you instructions as to how to write that proposal and how to share it here. More to come!

Ms. Mason