'How To Read Literature Like A Professor' By Thomas Foster

In the novel “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” by Thomas Foster, the reader is taught a myriad of different aspects, trends, and habits used by authors in writing their novels over the years. We, the readers, are taught how to identify these characteristics and what we can learn from a piece of literature after we have examined it thoroughly. In the first chapter titled “Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)”, we are shown how to identify when a character is sent on a quest, even when they seemingly have just performed some arbitrary task that we might not recognize as being important. A quest, according to the novel, has five major components that make it so; a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route, and a real reason to go there. There are many novels, or just short stories that are written including quests, without the reader actually realizing that one has occurred. For example, in the novel The Hunger Games, a quest has been completed in the very beginning of the book when the main character volunteers to take her sister’s place of almost certain death. One might think, “But it’s just the beginning of the novel how could a whole quest have already …show more content…
So, if they’re so unnoticeable, what is the point in recognizing them? What does it add to the story? The main benefit of discovering these small quests are that they show you step by step how the character(s) in the story arrived to where they are now. You can breakdown where a character went wrong in their journey, what they did right, and the traits of the character that led them to make the decisions they did. It really helps understand the character more and their decision-making process, which ultimately leads to better analysis and understanding of a piece of literature, something that is very important to a professor of the