Analyzing literature

Reading through this, I realized that there are many things that just never clicked in my brain. One really big thing that I always thought to be true in stories is that the author and the narrator were the same, that if the narrator is thinking one way than the author must be as well, but according to this passage, that is not true. The author and the narrator could have two completely different views on something, what the narrator thinks doesn't always portray what the author believes: "guard against the temptation to assume that the narrator is the author. An author must create a narrator who believes the characters are real people, even though the author knows they are not; there is always some distance between the author and the narrator. That distance may be quite small, or it may be enormous". I also didn't notice that an object or a setting could be construed as a character, whenever I hear the word "character" I automatically think a person, not a thing: "Occasionally an object or a setting can be considered a character...". Another thing that I didn't realize before was that "symbols do not mean, they suggest or remind or reflect". I knew about the part in this packet that says, "A symbol is an element in a story that suggests more than what it is", ever since I first learned about symbols, I knew that was true, but I always thought that there was one correct meaning of a symbol, not many. I guess it makes sense though, not everyone has the same thoughts and ideas, some people just see things differently, and since everyone has faced their own experiences in life, they could be related in many different ways.

One thing I need to learn is how to pinpoint those important symbols that contribute to the over all story. I'm not very good at finding the symbols. Another thing I need to work on is reading the work in a way that would help me analyze it, I tend to just read through a story instead of analyzing it, and I need to work on that a lot more.

I feel like I'm good enough at discovering the plot, like why the author put it in and why it is in that sequence. I'd probably be able to teach someone how to find the plot of a work.