Prompts for “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” 5-Paragraph Essay
Directions: Choose one of the prompts below to focus on for your essay. I provide multiple questions in each prompt to encourage your thinking, but you are not required to answer all of them. That would be weird. Think about the instances that stand out to you the most from the story. Not every example you highlighted can or needs to be analyzed. Your goal is to create an argument about the short story, thoroughly analyzing a specific aspect of the text without summarizing.
Prompt 2: How are temperatures used in the text?
Is there a pattern to how the temperatures are used? Are certain temperatures associated more with one particular character or scene? Why?
The temperatures will often fluctuate in the story, sometimes even changing in a single sentence. Why does Bradbury do this? How do these temperatures reflect the tone of the story or the emotions of the characters?
What do these temperatures represent in the story? (This will require you to establish your own understanding of what the temperatures represent and find the most impactful uses of that temperature in the text to analyze the significance.)
