Your middle paragraphs will explain your thesis (your central idea) and give evidence from the story to support it. Refer to incidents from the story that support your thesis. You may also quote sentences that are directly relevant to your thesis, and refer to keywords from the story whose connotations support your thesis. Just as a lawyer in court must offer enough evidence to defend his client, so you must offer enough evidence from the story to support your thesis. But don’t just quote from the story. Explain how you interpret the quotation, which words seem significant and what they suggest about the point you are making. When you quote something directly, remember to use quotation marks around it. (You may want to omit some material within a quotation that is unnecessary to your point; in this case, use ellipsis – three spaced periods -- to indicate omitted material.)
The best way to begin each middle paragraph is with a topic sentence that summarises the paragraph and shows how that paragraph relates to your thesis. Do not begin a paragraph with a fact about the plot. It will only lead you to another fact about the plot and you’ll find you’ll be summarising the plot instead of interpreting the story. Also, do not begin a paragraph or any sentence within the paragraph with a direct quotation from the story. Instead, work the quotation into your own prose, in a smooth, grammatically correct way:
It is Karl who calls the narrator outside to see "the enormous diamond with a heart of fire . . . suddenly planted there in the midst of the frozen water of the marsh."
Your middle paragraphs should read coherently with each sentence flowing smoothly into the next sentence, and each paragraph making a smooth transition into the succeeding paragraph. At times it will seem as if you are re-telling the story in the context of your theory of how the story works. Though you need not follow the sequence of events in the story. Your thesis may dictate a different order. Remember to keep the reader on track of your thesis all the way through the paper, and not to lose him through unnecessary digressions.
Here is a sample middle paragraph from the essay on the motif of chrysanthemums in "The Odour of Chrysanthemums":
Mrs. Bates’ ambivalent feelings towards her husband are reflected in her ambivalence towards the chrysanthemums. She is both disgusted by her husband and nostalgic for the good times they used to have. When John, her son, "tears at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropped the petals," she feels sorry for the flowers – and for herself – and taking a twig of flowers she "held them against her face" in fond memory of the way the marriage used to be. And the, "instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in her apron-band." She wears the flower as an emblem to their now defunct relationship just as some people wear arm-bands at a funeral. Yet when the daughter is excited about the mother keeping a flower in her apron, Mrs. Bates is sarcastic, saying, "Goodness me! One would think the house is afire" and she "irritably . . . took the flowers out from her apron-band."