Passage Indices

A passage index is a series of quotations and paraphrases accompanied by page references. Critics, teachers, and students use them as road maps for books, especially long or complex works of fiction.

From this page you can access a number of indices I have compiled for my classes. These indices may be of greatest interest to my students, though other serious readers might also find them useful.

All of the works indexed here are under copyright, so the amount of quotation has been held to "fair use" limits. The indices are tools for reading in depth, not simplifications or condensations. The index will not do you much good unless you have already read the book carefully.

In order to facilitate text searching, most of these indices have been formatted as a single HTML "page." The entire document will be loaded by your browser when you activate a link to it. This could take some time, depending on the quality of your connection and the performance of the Internet. Most of these files will take as long to load as a medium-sized graphic. Sizes are given in the list below.

Here are my conventions for quotation: any text not enclosed by brackets is directly quoted. Text inside brackets was written by me, usually as paraphrase. Quotations within the paraphrases are set off by the usual inverted commas ("").

Please let me know about any mistakes you may find.

The current list will be expanded from time to time.


Bury, Stephen. Interface
53 kilobytes
DeLillo, Don. Mao II
32 kilobytes
DeLillo, Don. White Noise
45 kilobytes
Howe, Neil and Bill Strauss. 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
36 kilobytes
McKibben, Bill. The Age of Missing Information
18 kilobytes
Perelman, Lewis J. School's Out
36 kilobytes
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49
28 kilobytes
Taylor, Mark C. and Esa Saarinen. Imagologies: Media Philosophy
38 kilobytes
Wenders, Wim. Until the End of the World [film]
16 kilobytes


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