Cuyamaca College This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen Essay
Prompt
Tadeusz Borowski’s story does not merely reflect a parade of atrocity but shows the difficulty of avoiding complicity with it. The critic Christopher Bigsby has said, “His survival depended on the deaths of others.”* To what degree does the story ask us to pass judgment on its narrator and characters—or, does it suggest that judgment becomes impossible in such circumstances?
Instruction:
Use the third person. Do not use the “I” pronoun.
Introduce your essay by establishing what prompt you are responding to. Briefly summarize the reading. State your thesis.
Support your thesis in a few paragraphs. For each paragraph, provide a topic sentence that directly supports your thesis. Use textual evidence in every body paragraph. Textual evidence may be direct quotes, but it could also be a paraphrase or summary of events. At the end of the evidence give the author or translator and the page number.
Conclude your essay with some final thoughts on the subject.