Plot Outline for Short Story

Introduction: In a field in the heart of _______ grows a splendorous white flower. Its powder-white petals unfurl around midjune, and blooming with it, a revived memory of struggle, turmoil, and death. You may ask, but only if you listen hard enough, will it tell you its story.
This is kind of starting at the end of the story, like the exercise we did in class the other day. The white flower is in a field that the boy this story is about grew up in, and returned to every night in hopes of finding a better world. It represented his hope. When he dies, he is buried here, and this flower grows over his grave.

Conflict: The boy is Jewish and growing up in Germany. His family had before this time lived out in the country as farmers, but when they go bankrupt, they are forced to move into the city so that both the mother and father could obtain jobs. They live in a large apartment building with many, many other people, and it is difficult for the boy to get used to, but after a while he begins to like it. He meets new people, including a girl he begins to like. He is 15.

Complication: Word starts to spread that Hitler, their newfound savior of a leader is starting to kill people off. His family hears by radio that Hitler is planning on 'getting rid of' some select people in society that would make things much better for them all as a whole. This is the beginning of the 2nd World War. This is by far the most involved part of the story, but the situation becomes to get so bad that his family must hide out in their apartment. When the Nazis being taking people out of their homes to move them into ghettos, the boy decides to join the army. He joins forces with Hitler, his enemy, to ensure the safety of his family.

Climax: He puts on the mask of being just another one of the parts of Hitlers child legions, and even starts to believe he is really one of them. Only when he sees one of the girls he used to go to school with in a concentration camp, skeletal and dying, does he realize he is wrong. He brings himself around and snaps himself into place, recognizing he is Jewish, and does care about the people he has been torturing for the past few years. He knows that he is one of them. He tries to help her escape, only to watch her get shot down right in front of his eyes.

Falling Action: He asks to be transferred, and is moved to the less front-line job of policing the streets of civilian towns. He is informed that his mother is sick. When he goes to visit her, he realizes that she is dying, and quickly. His father and little brother had died of some sickness during the winter, and she was also sick from it. She had outlasted them. She asks him to bury her in the field where they used to live, with the flowers and the rest of nature. Away from all this poverty and destruction. He obliges, and when she dies, takes a car out with her body to bury her.

Resolution: When he comes to the field, it is completely war-torn, barren and destroyed. Nowhere near the field that he had conjured up every night in his imagination to bring some sort of serenity to his heart. He digs a grave for his mother. He looks around in despair, and sees what his world has come to. Feels the blood of all the people he had killed on his hands. Memories flood back, and in his despair, he raises his gun to his temple; the gun that had taken so many lives before in his hands, took his also. The flower represents his story.