The fundamentals of reading fiction closely: what details reveal about a character, how setting carries values, how plot orders events and builds conflict, who is telling the story and from where, and how to turn those observations into a claim you can defend with evidence. Examples come from Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Description, dialogue and behavior reveal characters. Descriptions can come from a narrator, other characters or the characters themselves. Perspective is how a character understands their circumstances, informed by background, personality, biases and relationships, and it is shaped and revealed by relationships, setting, events and ideas.
Setting is the time and place in which a story's events occur. Setting details don't just depict where and when; they convey values associated with that setting and often mirror or contrast with a character's inner life.
Plot is the sequence of events, each building on the others, often by cause and effect. The dramatic situation is the setting and action that place characters in conflict, often with rising or falling fortunes. Plot and exposition direct attention to what matters most: characters, relationships and setting.
Narrators relate the story and establish a relationship with the reader. Perspective is how someone sees their circumstances; point of view is the position from which the story is told. The narrator isn't necessarily the author. First-person narrators are involved in events; third-person narrators are outside observers whose knowledge ranges from observational to all-knowing.
Literary analysis starts with close reading for details that, together, support a claim about the text. A claim is a statement that requires defense with textual evidence. A paragraph's first components are the claim and the evidence that defends it, cited briefly rather than summarized.