The Moon and Sixpence gives students a character who is easy to dislike and hard to explain. Charles Strickland abandons his family to paint, and the narrator who tells his story is never fully sure whether to condemn him or admire him. Student essays on the novel often fall into one of two traps, either moral outrage with little textual support or uncritical praise of artistic genius. A grading approach that anticipates both helps you respond fairly to either extreme.

Character analysis is more than a list of traits. Students need to show how a character is built through action, dialogue, and the way other people describe him. In this novel that includes the narrator's own uncertain judgments, which are filtered through his limited access to Strickland's thoughts. Essays that account for this filter are doing more advanced work than essays that treat the narrator as a neutral camera.

It also helps to tell students plainly that disliking a character is not an argument. A reader may find Strickland's cruelty repellent, but the essay must still explain how the text constructs that impression and what it wants the reader to conclude. Marking down opinion without evidence is easier to defend when the rubric says so in advance. That clarity also protects students who hold unpopular but well-supported views.

What Strong Character Essays Do Differently

Stronger papers choose one aspect of Strickland and follow it through the book, such as his relationship to beauty, his indifference to other people's suffering, or the way he is seen differently in Paris and Tahiti. They treat contradictions as meaningful rather than as errors in the character. They also pay attention to what the narrator withholds, since the gaps in his account shape the reader's judgment. These habits are specific enough to be turned into rubric language.

• Identifies a clear, arguable claim about Strickland rather than listing personality traits
• Uses scenes from more than one stage of the story to support the claim
• Separates what Strickland does from what the narrator says about him
• Considers the cost of Strickland's choices for Blanche, Dirk, and his own family
• Explains what the novel suggests about art and responsibility without turning the essay into a lecture

Common Weaknesses and How to Comment on Them

The most frequent weakness is reliance on summary, where a student retells Strickland's departure and then adds a sentence declaring him selfish. A useful comment points to the sentence that comes closest to analysis and asks the student to build the whole paragraph from it. Another common weakness is treating the narrator's opinion as the author's, which flattens the novel's irony. A brief margin note asking who is speaking in a given passage can prompt the student to see the difference.

When grading a full class set, record the recurring issues in a short list as you read. After twenty papers you will usually have three or four patterns that account for most lost points. Turning those into a reusable comment bank saves time and keeps your wording consistent from paper to paper. A grading assistant like GraideMind can also apply the same rubric language across a stack and flag papers where the evidence is thin.

Handle Moral Disagreement Fairly

Students bring strong feelings to a book about a man who abandons his family, and those feelings sometimes show up as sharp judgments of Strickland or of the narrator. A fair grader focuses on how well the argument is supported, not on whether it matches the teacher's own view. Telling students this at the start of the unit encourages honest engagement and reduces the temptation to guess what the teacher wants to hear. It also makes grade conversations easier when a student feels strongly.

Where possible, build in a short peer discussion before the essay is written. Hearing a classmate defend the opposite reading often sharpens a student's own thesis and surfaces counterevidence they had overlooked. The best final essays frequently acknowledge a competing interpretation and explain why the writer finds it less convincing. That move is worth naming explicitly in the rubric because it is a mark of mature academic writing.

Use the Novel to Teach Evidence Selection

The Moon and Sixpence is short enough that students can reread key chapters while drafting, which makes it a good vehicle for teaching evidence selection. Ask them to bring three passages to class and explain why each belongs in the essay and which one they would cut first. This forces a decision about relevance that many students skip. The exercise also gives you a quick checkpoint before the full draft arrives.

By the end of the unit, you should be able to see growth in how students connect quotations to claims. Compare the first character paragraph a student wrote with the last, and note whether the later version explains its evidence instead of simply presenting it. That comparison makes a convincing piece of feedback on its own. It shows the student, in concrete terms, what improvement in analysis looks like.