Stories are everywhere. 1. Not only do we tell stories, but stories tell us: if stories are everywhere, we are also in stories. 2. The telling of a story is always bound up with power, property and domination. 3. Stories are multiple: there is always more than one story. 4. Stories always have something to tell us about stories themselves: they always involve self- reflexive and metafictional dimensions.

What is Literary Criticism? .

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2)Interpretationinvolves assessing not only the author’s imaginative invention, but also the unique way in which the author has handled the expressive materials that have been selected. For your interpretation of literature to be sound, you must combine your recognition of the formal aspects of a text from above, with your own response to the text itself.

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We are able to read present moments – in literature and, by extension, in life – as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot (Peter Brooks, 1984)

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line...then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away...and long black streaks...sometimes you could hear… jumbled up voices. Mark Twain,Huckleberry Finn(1885).

The river is never wholly chartable; it changes pace, it shifts its channel, unaccountably; it may suddenly effect a sandbar, and throw up another bar where before was navigable water. T. S. Eliot, from Introduction toHuckleberry Finn, 1950.

Any novelist will tell you there are a finite number of stories. I reckon there are three: Boy becomes Man; Man stares Death in the Face; A Stranger Comes to Town.