📚AP English Literature
📚AP English Literature
FRQ 2 – Prose Fiction Analysis
Practice FRQ 1 of 191/19
2. The following excerpt is from Mark Twain's book Roughing It, published in 1872. In this passage, the narrator describes a stagecoach journey across the American West from Missouri to Nevada.
Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Twain uses literary elements and techniques to portray the narrator's complex experience of the arduous journey.
In your response you should do the following:
- Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
- Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
- Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
- Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.
Par.
1
Our journey began on a very hot day in July, 1861. We commenced at St. Joseph, Missouri, on the extreme western verge of the frontier, and ended at Carson City, Nevada, in the eastern shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. We made the journey in twenty days by stage-coach, and were twenty-one days coming back in the Overland Mail. We averaged eighteen hours in the saddle per day, for the whole journey. Our legs became so numb and stiff with so much riding that when we alighted at night we could hardly stand. Our clothes were so thoroughly saturated with alkali dust, which is fine and penetrating and has properties similar to those of lye, that they became stiff and "shiny," and felt like wearing a shirt of finely crushed window glass. The sun beat down with a direct, blistering fierceness that threatened to consume us. The alkali dust cut through our lips, and the sore places refused to heal. The coach jolted and bumped over a road that was without beginning and without end, and was made wholly of ditches and stones and holes and gullies and sometimes of sand, wherein the wheels slumped and worried and fretted, and the coach shrieked and groaned and protested, and the mules sweated and the driver swore. And through it all, the heat, the dust, the thirst, the weariness, we endured, and at last we reached the land of silver and gold—the land of sage-brush, alkali, and the jackass rabbit.
