Assignment 10: Name two important events of rising action that Knowles uses to build up to the climax of the fall. If you choose the trial, choose a specific incident to discuss and how it leads to the fall.(Ja’Niya)

Knowles had started foreshadowing Finny’s fall down the stairs and most likely his death since the beginning of the book. The first important events were in the introduction of Gene’s revisit to Devon and how him walking into the First Academy Building.  Gene was walking into the building and he begins to talk about these marble stairs, “..I reached a marble foyer and stopped at the foot of a long white marble flight of stairs….The marble must be unusually hard… with all my thoughts about these stairs, this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me. It was surprising I had overlooked that, that crucial fact.”  He was referring back to the exact steps that Finny would later fall down and how the must have been extremely hard to either kill or seriously injured Finny. The second important event doesn’t seem that important and probably was overlooked. Before the trial begins Brinker asks everyone to pray and Gene says, “If Brinker had said “Let us pray” and I had said, “Go to hell” everything might have been saved”(Knowles 167). That wouldn’t really put a lot of fear and worry in the reader’s mind because it would be seen as Brinker talking about Leper and not the incident. But if it was read over and the reader examines how the boys are sitting Gene and Finny together facing Brinker it would bring worry into the reader’s head. Knowles used sneaky little events to build up the climax of Finny’s fall even from the beginning of the book.