Brian's Winter

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the bulleted outlines below. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Gary Paulsen often uses syntax to convey Brian’s emotions and his sense of how quickly time is moving. Choose one scene where you find the syntax especially effective at doing this and use this scene as the basis for your response.

• How is Paulsen using syntax to show what Brian is thinking and feeling? (topic sentence)
• Give quoted examples that demonstrate patterns in the syntax of this scene. (Think about sentence lengths, parallelism, sentence fragments, and so on.)
• Explain how these patterns create effects that communicate Brian’s thoughts and feelings.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, show how using syntax to convey Brian’s inner state helps the reader understand larger meanings in the story.

2. Brian sometimes spends time having imaginary “visits” with people from back home.

• What message about human companionship do these scenes send? (topic sentence)
• Give examples from three of these scenes to support your claim about the message these scenes send.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, show how the message sent by these scenes relates to the larger concern of Brian’s growth as a person during his time in the wilderness.

3. One way that Paulsen characterizes Brian is through his reactions to plot events. Choose one plot event and Brian’s reaction to it as the basis of your response.

• What happens, and what do Brian’s actions, thoughts, and feelings show about what kind of a person he is? (topic sentence)
• Give examples of things Brian does, thinks, and feels in this scene that support your interpretation of his personality.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, show how this characterization of Brian relates to the novel’s larger thematic concern with The Role of Intellect in Survival or the way that Awareness of One’s Surroundings Brings Emotional Rewards.

Full Essay Assignments

Student Prompt: Write a structured and well-developed essay. Include a thesis statement, at least three main points supported by text details, and a conclusion.

1. Consider the varying pace of this story: Sometimes Gary Paulsen relates dramatic and exciting events, and other times he tells the reader about the small details of Brian’s ordinary daily routines. Does describing the step-by-step processes of Brian’s survival routine take something away from the reader’s excitement, or are these scenes performing an important job—conveying theme or making the pace of the book more effective, for instance? Write an essay in which you describe the balance between these two types of scenes and defend a clear claim about why the “ordinary daily routine” scenes are or are not performing an important task. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text, making sure to cite any quoted material.

2. A motif is a recurring pattern inside a piece of literature. In Brian’s Winter, there is a clear motif of death. What kind of language and images are used to convey scenes involving death? What are Brian’s thoughts and feelings about death? Given these choices, what might Paulsen be trying to convey about death? Write an essay in which you analyze the motif of death in this novel. Show how this motif supports the novel’s larger thematic concern with Nature’s Beauty Versus Nature’s Severity. Support your assertions with both quoted and paraphrased evidence drawn from throughout the text, making sure to cite any quoted material.

3. Some critics talk about plot conflicts in terms like “humans versus nature” and “humans versus themselves.” Brian’s Winter contains both kinds of conflict. But is the central conflict of this story more one kind of plot than the other? Brian would probably say that his main conflict is just trying to survive. Does he mainly need to master himself in order to do this, or is he mostly in some kind of battle against nature? Write an essay in which you evaluate the balance of these two kinds of plot conflicts in Brian’s Winter. Show how this balance relates to one or more of the novel’s larger thematic concerns: Nature’s Beauty Versus Nature’s Severity, The Role of Intellect in Survival, and Awareness of One’s Surroundings Brings Emotional Rewards. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text, making sure to cite any quoted material.