English Literature Suggested Reading 2

Key moments in 20th century history World War One (1914‐1918) When a young Bosnian Serb assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on the 28th June 1914, he set off a chain of events that would ultimately result in the outbreak of World War One, a war that grew to involve thirty‐two countries across the globe. By its end, over 17 million soldiers and civilians had died, and the nature of war itself had been transformed by the advent of modern weaponry and military technology. The brutality and scale of the conflict was rendered most famously in the poetry produced during and after the war, but writers continued to be fascinated and horrified by its aftermath throughout the 1920s. The disjunction between actual reality and the high ideals propounded by propagandists of the time was itself part of a wider crisis in meaning and representation that animated much Modernist writing, including T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. While the modernist movement had begun prior to the war, the conflict’s vast scale, brutality, and costs fascinated many artists and writers. The war definitively ended many social and cultural traditions that survived the nineteenth century and made clear the modern, mechanised world we were entering, a world where the older expressive forms and techniques no longer seemed adequate, appropriate, or compelling.

Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, oil on canvas, 182.8 x 317.5 cm (Imperial War Museum, London)

Extract from The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Key moments in 20th century history The Russian Revolution (1917) When delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stepped outside in the early morning of the 26th October 1917, they witnessed the first day of a workers’ government, in the world’s first workers’ state. The Russian revolution, perhaps more than any other event in the 20th century, radically divides opinion. Did it offer a glimpse of a different world, a world of justice and freedom? Or was it merely the beginning of one of the darkest, bloodiest, and most violent regimes in human history? The violent rupture of the revolution, for good or ill, reverberated across Europe and the world, and indelibly marked literature from 1917 and beyond. Certainly, the tragic degeneration of the revolution into the terrifying totalitarianism of Stalinism served to inspire George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. But the revolution also served, for a time, to suggest a new kind of art was both possible and necessary. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (1921) was praised, in a review by T.S. Eliot, for its ability to “transform the music of the steppes [flat, unforested grassland] into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music”. Artistic experimentation and diversity were hallmarks of the years immediately after the revolution, and this mood of experimentation and desire to produce a modern means of artistic expression influenced writers like Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and, later, Auden and Orwell. Questions about the relationship between literature and politics were especially acute in this period, as was the extent to which art should itself have a clear political commitment. Whether in the current trend for dystopian visions of the future, or recent films like I, Daniel Blake that seek to challenge social and economic injustice, one hundred years later its influence remains.

El Lissitzky Red Wedge, 1919

Extract from Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell

But they woke at dawn as usual, and suddenly remembering the glorious thing that had happened, they all raced out into the pasture together. A little way down the pasture there was a knoll that commanded a view of most of the farm. The animals rushed to the top of it and gazed round them in the clear morning light. Yes, it was theirs‐‐everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement. They rolled in the dew, they cropped mouthfuls of the sweet summer grass, they kicked up clods of the black earth and snuffed its rich scent. Then they made a tour of inspection of the whole farm and surveyed with

speechless admiration the ploughland, the hayfield, the orchard, the pool, the spinney. It was as though they had never seen these things before, and even now they could hardly believe that it was all their own.

Key moments in 20th century history World War Two and the Holocaust (1939‐1945) “Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, his account of his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz

Estimates vary, but the total loss of life as a result of the Second World War was between 60 and 80 million people. It is the deadliest military conflict in human history. Western science, technology, and industry were all employed with devastating success to waging ‘total’ war, a conflict that affected nearly every continent and its peoples. Humanity’s capacity for evil raised profound moral, social and spiritual questions ‐ what of the passive immorality of people and nations which could not be prosecuted, that vastly greater number who knew (or should have known), who stood by and who did nothing while wartime genocide and atrocities were committed? If World War One produced a crisis in meaning and representation, the Second World War suggested a universe that was senseless, useless and absurd. What of truth, value and meaning when there were deliberate genocide campaigns, systematically enacted with technologically‐ assisted success? Art and literature were never the same again, and the end of the war is viewed by some academics as the beginning of the period known as postmodernity. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) examines the darkest elements of human nature – schoolboys are cast away on a Pacific island during a nuclear war, re‐enacting humanity’s fall from grace as their relationships degenerate from innocent camaraderie to totalitarian butchery. Other novels, such as Albert Camus' The Plague (1947), question the possibility of human progress and the horror of self‐seeking materialism that prefigures the advent of consumerism. Artistic responses to the horrors of the Holocaust continue to be produced, from the graphic novel Maus (1980‐1991) which examines the genocide through allegory, memoir, biography and history, to films like Son of Saul (2015), which uses a highly distinct cinematic language to depict a Jewish prisoner forced to work in the gas chambers. When the cultural critic Theodor Adorno wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, he meant not to silence poets and writers, but to recognise that the Holocaust was unspeakable – how can literature be possible in such a world? All literature thereafter, consciously or not, is engaged with this question.

Extract from The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus

None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen‐chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that

perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. Key moments in 20th century history Vietnam War (1954‐1975) Opposition to America’s extensive military intervention in Vietnam, an intervention that intensified over the course of the 1960s, served as a lightning rod for wider social concerns about economic and social justice. This aggregate movement encompassed opposition to traditional modes of authority and a desire to challenge the social, cultural and sexual attitudes of the time. This movement, beginning in college campuses around the US, involved many young people, the result of the ‘Baby Boom’ after World War Two. The unprecedented number of potentially disaffected young people were radicalised by events such as the ongoing and bloody conflict in Vietnam, and they were prepared to openly question the direction of America and other democratic societies across the globe. The literature of this period sought to redefine the genres, platforms, and technologies of modern literary production, and attempted to make literature the vehicle for a way of living that tried to subvert norms of race, gender, and class. This was a period of huge literary experimentation, from the stream‐of‐consciousness style of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), to the introduction of chance into the writing process in William Burrough’s ‘cut up’ technique in works like The Naked Lunch (1959). During this period, people across the world were rebelling over a wide range of disparate issues (of which the Vietnam war was but one), and this rebelliousness was what they had in common. The profound sense of alienation from the established order, and distaste of authority and authoritarianism, coincided with the explosion of television as a major cultural phenomenon. As such, the message of protest spread across the world and ushered in what the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan called the ‘Global Village’. Today it may feel banal to describe the world as ever‐shrinking in size with the ubiquity of the internet – in this period, footage of the Vietnam War, Paris protests or the Moon landing was both shocking and thrilling.

Vietnam veterans protest the ongoing war, 1971

Extract from Howl (1955) by Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow‐eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold‐ water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, 5 who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake‐light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull

Key moments in 20th century history Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Soviet Union, and with it, the end of the Cold War between the capitalist West and Communist East. The Soviet Union came to an end almost overnight, an entire social and economic system that had been established in 1917 collapsed. In the years that followed, it was suggested that the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded another kind of ending: the end of history itself. Francis Fukuyama’s famous work, The End of History (1992), suggested that “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post‐war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. The core idea, that Western‐style liberal democracy would be the major form of government around the world, ushered in an age that was ‘post‐political’. This is worth considering in relation to Jean‐François Lyotard’s classic 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard suggests there are a number of ‘grand narratives’ that seek to explain the processes of the world, such as Christian theology or Marxism. In postmodernity, there is a deep antipathy to such grand narratives, which are seen to be authoritarian and exclusionary. As such, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the widespread view that communism had ‘failed’, was part of a wider postmodern turn towards local, small‐scale narratives about the world. If there were no large‐scale stories we could tell ourselves to make sense of the world, what of literature in this period? The use of unreliable narration, intertextuality, fragmentation, pastiche and irony all sought to undermine and question the ‘truthfulness’ of a literary text, in which the narrative you held in your hands was but one among a near‐infinite number of others. Writers sought to mix genres and dissolve the divide between high and low culture – Margaret Atwood mixed science fiction with fairy tales, and Umberto Eco took the detective novel while including references to Aristotle and Arthur Conan Doyle. This was a period in which liberal capitalism seemed all‐conquering, and while literature of the period may have satirised its consumerist excesses in works like American Psycho (1992), the notion of political commitment was largely absent during this period – what political alternatives were there after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Image of protestors climbing the Berlin Wall, 1989

Extract from American Psycho (1992) by Bret Easton Ellis

He takes off the expensive‐looking Walkman from around his neck, still complaining. “I hate to complain—I really do—about the trash, the garbage, the disease, about how filthy this city really is and you know and I know that it is a sty . . .” He continues talking as he opens his new Tumi calfskin attaché case he bought at D. F. Sanders. He places the Walkman in the case alongside a Panasonic wallet‐size cordless portable folding Easa‐phone (he used to own the NEC 9000 Porta portable) and pulls out today’s newspaper. “In one issue—in one issue—let’s see here . . . strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Communist rally, Mafia boss wiped out, 6

Nazis”—he flips through the pages excitedly—“baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots dropping like flies in the streets, surrogate mothers, the cancellation of a soap opera, kids who broke into a zoo and tortured and burned various animals alive, more Nazis . . . and the joke is, the punch line is, it’s all in this city—nowhere else, just here, it sucks, whoa wait, more Nazis, gridlock, gridlock, baby‐sellers, black‐ market babies, AIDS babies, baby junkies, building collapses on baby, maniac baby, gridlock, bridge collapses—” His voice stops, he takes in a breath and then quietly says, his eyes fixed on a beggar at the corner of Second and Fifth, “That’s the twenty‐fourth one I’ve seen today. I’ve kept count.” Key moments in 21th century history 9/11 Attacks (2001) The violent spectacle of the 9/11 attacks was shocking and profound – to a Western audience used to viewing terrorism as largely occurring elsewhere, such an attack on American soil represented the return of history with a vengeance. The then‐president of America, George W. Bush, remarked shortly after that “on September 11 night fell on a new world”. In the years that followed, the ‘War on Terror’ witnessed military intervention across the globe, most notably in Afghanistan, then later in Iraq. The rise of Islamist terror meant that groups such as Al Qaeda gained widespread notoriety, and ushered in a new era of fear and anxiety. Such fear and anxiety was only compounded by the dawning realisation among the scientific community that climate change presented humanity with a problem of apocalyptic proportions. Works like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), with its unnamed apocalyptic event and brutal Darwinian struggles for survival, can be seen as part of a wider interest in ‘end of the world’ scenarios. From The Walking Dead to The Hunger Games trilogy, post‐apocalyptic and dystopian visions still plague popular consciousness in 2017. The wars in the early part of the 21st century also generated huge movements of people, and the question of borders and mass migration of refugees meant that literature also sought to examine questions of identity and belonging. Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) explored these issues before world events made them unavoidable – her portrait of postcolonial London spoke of “Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”. Documentaries by Adam Curtis, such as Bitter Lake (2015) and HyperNormalisation (2016), sought to reach back into the 20th century to understand an age of terror, climate change, technological upheaval and the rise of demagogic figures like Donald Trump and Marie Le Pen. Where this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion leads remains unclear – a world where technology liberates us from the drudgery of work, or humanity destroys itself and the planet? Either way, literature post‐9/11 continues to give voice to the deep anxieties of our age.

Extract from The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen

The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer autumn colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past: that these hundred‐odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been ringing for years.

She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. She was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and had shouted, "Enid! Enid!" so loudly that he couldn't hear her shouting back, "Al, I'm getting it!" He'd continued to shout her name, coming closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because there were aspects of the Axon situation that Enid knew about and hoped that Alfred didn't, she'd quickly stashed the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from the basement bellowing like a piece of earth‐moving equipment, "There's somebody at the door!" and she'd fairly screamed, "The mailman! The mailman!" and he'd shaken his head at the complexity of it all.

Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn't have to wonder, every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she might, she couldn't get him interested in life. When she encouraged him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. When she asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could do, he said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of her friends all had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? He'd been repainting the love seat since Labor Day. She seemed to recall that the last time he'd painted the furniture he'd done the love seat in two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he'd painted of the love seat was the legs.

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)

YEAR OF GLAD

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood‐walled, Remington‐hung, double‐windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.

I am in here.

Three faces have resolved into place above summer‐weight sportcoats and half‐Windsors across a polished pine conference table shiny with the spidered light of an Arizona noon. These are three Deans ‐ of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic Affairs. I do not know which face belongs to whom.

I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile.

I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully, ankle on knee, hands together in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X. The interview room's other personnel include: the University's Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and Academy prorector Mr. A. deLint. C.T. is beside me; the others sit, stand and stand, respectively, at the periphery of my focus. The tennis coach jingles pocket‐change. There is something vaguely digestive about the room's odor. The high‐traction sole of my complimentary Nike sneaker runs parallel to the wobbling loafer of my mother's half‐brother, here in his capacity as Headmaster, sitting in the chair to what I hope is my immediate right, also facing Deans.

The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality‐type I've come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me. Passed a packet of computer sheets by the shaggy lion of a Dean at center, he is peaking more or less to these pages, smiling down.

How does Foster Wallace use first person narrative perspective to articulate a sense of alienation and detachment?

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy (1985)

For the next two weeks they would ride by night, they would make no fire. They had struck the shoes from their horses and filled the nailholes in with clay and those who still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in and they slept in caves and on bare stone. They rode their horses through the tracks of their dismounting and they buried their stool like cats and they barely spoke at all. Crossing those barren gravel reefs in the night they seemed remote and without substance. Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse. A thing surmised from the blackness by the creak of leather and the chink of metal.

They cut the throats of the packanimals and jerked and divided the meat and they traveled under the cape of the wild mountains upon a broad soda plain with dry thunder to the south and rumors of light. Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds. They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

They crossed the del Norte and rode south into a land more hostile yet. All day they crouched like owls under the niggard acacia shade and peered out upon that cooking world. Dust‐devils stood on the horizon like the smoke of distant fires but of living thing there was none. They eyed the sun in its circus and at dusk they rode out upon the cooling plain where the western sky was the color of blood. At a desert well they dismounted and drank jaw to jaw with their horses and remounted and rode on. The little desert wolves yapped in the dark and Glanton’s dog trotted beneath the horse’s belly, its footfalls stitched precisely among the hooves.

That night they were visited with a plague of hail out of a faultless sky and the horses shied and moaned and the men dismounted and sat upon the ground with their saddles over their heads while the hail leaped in the sand like small lucent eggs concocted alchemically out of the desert darkness. When they resaddled and rode on they went for miles through cobbled ice while a polar moon rose like a blind cat’s eye up over

the rim of the world. In the night they passed the lights of a village on the plain but they did not alter from their course.

Toward the morning they saw fires on the horizon. Glanton sent the Delawares. Already the dawnstar burned pale in the east. When they returned they squatted with Glanton and the judge and the Brown brothers and spoke and gestured and then all remounted and all rode on.

Five wagons smoldered on the desert floor and the riders dismounted and moved among the bodies of the dead argonauts in silence, those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts. Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths. In their wigs of dried blood they lay gazing up with ape’s eyes at brother sun now rising in the east.

The wagons were no more than embers armatured with the blackened shapes of hoop‐iron and tires, the redhot axles quaking deep within the coals. The riders squatted at the fires and boiled water and drank coffee and roasted meat and lay down to sleep among the dead.

How does McCarthy use setting and location to frame acts of violence?

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the rack and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous content into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

How does Vonnegut play with narrative expectations to present the nature of warfare in WW2?

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (1958)

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

The drums beat and the flutes sang and the spectators held their breath. Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water. Every nerve and every muscle stood out on their arms, on their backs and their thighs, and one almost heard them stretching to breaking point. In the end, Okonkwo threw the Cat.

That was many years ago, twenty years or more, and during this time Okonkwo's fame had grown like a bush‐fire in the harmattan. He was tall and huge, and his bushy eyebrows and wide nose gave him a very severe look. He breathed heavily, and it was said that, when he slept, his wives and children in their houses could hear him breathe. When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists. He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with his father.

Unoka, for that was his father's name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm‐wine, called round his neighbors and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a dead man's mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one's lifetime. Unoka was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbor some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts.

He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute. He was very good on his flute, and his happiest moments were the two or three moons after the harvest when the village musicians brought down their instruments, hung above the fireplace. Unoka would play with them, his face beaming with blessedness and peace. Sometimes another

village would ask Unoka's band and their dancing egwugwu to come and stay with them and teach them their tunes. They would go to such hosts for as long as three or four markets, making music and feasting. Unoka loved the good fare and the good fellowship, and he loved this season of the year, when the rains had stopped and the sun rose every morning with dazzling beauty. And it was not too hot either, because the cold and dry harmattan wind was blowing down from the north. Some years the harmattan was very severe and a dense haze hung on the atmosphere. Old men and children would then sit round log fires, warming their bodies. Unoka loved it all, and he loved the first kites that returned with the dry season, and the children who sang songs of welcome to them. He would remember his own childhood, how he had often wandered around looking for a kite sailing leisurely against the blue sky. As soon as he found one he would sing with his whole being, welcoming it back from its long, long journey, and asking it if it had brought home any lengths of cloth.

How does Achebe use language in this extract to give the impression of psychological depth and complexity?

At Swim‐two‐birds – Flann O’Brien (1939)

HAVING placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare‐time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter‐ related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

Examples of three separate openings ‐ the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of the numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two‐leaved hinged writing‐table with inner sides waxed. His rough long‐nailed fingers toyed with a snuff‐box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth he whistled a civil cavatina. He was a courtly man and received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Corrigans of Carlow.

The second opening: There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr. John Furriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered ‐ he was born at the age of twenty‐five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it. His teeth were well‐formed but stained by tobacco, with two molars filled and a cavity threatened in the left canine. His knowledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyle's Law and the Parallelogram of Forces.

The third opening: Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain‐pass.

I hurt a tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of the crust I was eating. This recalled me to the perception of my surroundings.

It is a great pity, observed my uncle, that you don't apply yourself more to your studies. The dear knows your father worked hard enough for the money he is laying out on your education. Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all? 16

I surveyed my uncle in a sullen manner. He speared a portion of cooked rasher against a crust on the prongs of his fork and poised the whole at the opening of his mouth in a token of continued interrogation.

Description of my uncle: Red‐faced, bead‐eyed, ball‐bellied. Fleshy about the shoulders with long swinging arms giving ape‐like effect to gait. Large moustache. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.

I do, I replied.

He put the point of his fork into the interior of his mouth and withdrew it again, chewing in a coarse manner.

Quality of rasher in use in household: Inferior, one and two the pound.

Will faith, he said, I never see you at it. I never see you at your studies at all.

I work in my bedroom, I answered.

How does O’Brien use narrative to demonstrate the ways in which literary conventions and tropes can be resisted or subverted?

Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (1920)

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in "Faust" at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as "an exceptionally brilliant audience" had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient "Brown coupÃ©." To come to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold‐and‐gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the great livery‐stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black‐walnut bookcases and finial‐topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs. Archer allowed smoking. But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was "not the thing" to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not "the thing" played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.

The second reason for his delay was a personal one. He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion the moment he looked forward to was so rare and exquisite in quality that‐‐well, if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima donna's stage‐manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing: "He loves me‐‐he loves me not‐‐he loves me!‐‐" and sprinkling the falling daisy petals with notes as clear as dew.

She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English‐speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver‐backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.

"M'ama . . . non m'ama . . ." the prima donna sang, and "M'ama!" with a final burst of love triumphant, as she pressed the dishevelled daisy to her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance of the little brown Faust‐Capoul, who was vainly trying, in a tight purple velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his artless victim.

Newland Archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box, turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the house. Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott, whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to attend the Opera, but who was always represented on fashionable nights by some of the younger members of the family. On this occasion, the front of the box was filled by her daughter‐in‐law, Mrs. Lovell Mingott, and her daughter, Mrs. Welland; and slightly withdrawn behind these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stage lovers. As Madame Nilsson's "M'ama!" thrilled out above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during the Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a single gardenia. She dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet of lilies‐of‐the‐valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw her white‐gloved finger‐tips touch the flowers softly. He drew a breath of satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage.

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the Opera Houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange‐trees but studded with large pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses, and closely resembling the floral pen‐ wipers made by female parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath the rose‐ trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose‐branch flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far‐off prodigies.

In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless

incomprehension of his designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from the right wing.

How does Wharton depict social class and its importance in this extract through the use of description of setting?

Ulysses – James Joyce (1922)

Get a light snack in Davy Byrne’s. Stopgap. Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.

—Roast and mashed here.

—Pint of stout.

Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.

He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!

Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every mother’s son don’t talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women and children cabmen priests parsons fieldmarshals archbishops. From Ailesbury road, Clyde road, artisans’ dwellings, north Dublin union, lord mayor in his gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My plate’s empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir Philip Crampton’s fountain. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief. Next chap rubs on a new batch with his. Father O’Flynn would make hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it. Hate people all round you. City Arms hotel table d’hôte she called it. Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing. Then who’d wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.

After all there’s a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers’ buckets wobbly lights. Give us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don’t maul them pieces, young one. 21

Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.

Ah, I’m hungry.

He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?

—Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.

—Hello, Flynn.

—How’s things?

—Tiptop… Let me see. I’ll take a glass of burgundy and… let me see.

Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is home without Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect. There was a right royal old nigger. Who ate or something the somethings of the reverend Mr MacTrigger. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and war depend on some fellow’s digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese.

How does Joyce present the everyday lives of characters through the use of unconventional sentence structures?

Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (1925)

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton — such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards' shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun

Nor the furious winter's rages.

This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.

There were Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith's Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried‐up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women's ailments. How much she wanted it — that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently! She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea‐stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

How does Woolf use language to present gender and identity in this extract?

The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie (1988)

''To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat‐taa! Taka‐thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . .' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full‐grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty‐nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, 'To the devil with your tunes,' the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now.'

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly‐stroke, breast‐stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost‐ infinity of the almost‐dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What‐ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname‐hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat.'

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginnlng, a miniature echo of the birth of time ... the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight A 1‐420, blew apart without any warning high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow‐white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. 25

Who am l?

Who else is there?

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed‐pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty‐free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also ‐‐ for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable doing‐their‐job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Govemment had cast its everreasonable doubts ‐‐ mingling with the remnants of the plane equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed‐off selves, severed mothertongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open‐beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud‐covered. awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.

'0, my shoes are Japanese,' Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi‐conscious deference to the uprushing host‐nation, 'These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that.' The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo‐nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast‐delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yessir, but not random. Up there in air‐space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet‐shrinker and power‐vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic,‐‐because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.

What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation ... take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?

How does Rushdie use elements of magic realism to present issues of nationhood, religion and identity in this extract?

Underworld – Don Delillo (1997)

He spread the mayonnaise. He spread mayonnaise on the bread. Then he slapped the lunch meat down. He never spread the mayonnaise on the meat. He spread it on the bread. Then he slapped down the meat and watched the mayo seep around the edges.

He took the sandwich into the next room. His dad was watching TV, sitting in that periscope stoop of his, crookback, like he might tumble into the rug. His dad had infirmities still waiting for a name. Things you had to play one against another. If one thing required a certain medication, it made another thing worse. There were setbacks and side effects, there was a schedule of medications that Richard and his mother tried to keep track of through the daily twists of half doses and warning labels and depending on this and don’t forget that.

Richard ate about half the sandwich and left the rest on the arm of the chair. In the kitchen he called his friend Bud Walling, who lived forty miles into nowhere and wasn’t really his friend.

He drove out to Bud’s place through old fields marked off for development, with skivvy strips on narrow posts running stiff in the wind. Out here the wind was a force that seized the mind. You left the high school a quarter of a mile behind still hearing the big flag snapping and the halyard beating nautically on the pole and you powered your car into the wind and saw dust sweep across the road and you drove into a white sky feeling useless and dumb.

Bud’s place could have been something blown in from the hills. It had a look of being deposited in a natural spree, with lumber warping in the yard and sprung‐open doors and an unfinished porch on cinder blocks, one of those so‐low porches the house looks sunk in sand. Bud had a coydog that lived in chains in a ramshackle hut out back, part coyote, part alley mutt. Richard thought this dog was less dangerous than legend would have it. Richard thought Bud kept this dog basically for the juvenile thrill of having a chained beast that he could feed or starve according to his whim.

He realized he’d forgotten to give his dad two glasses of water to take with the blue and yellow capsule despite the bold‐faced reminder on the prescription bottle. These little failures ate away at his confidence even when he knew it was his father’s fault for not managing his own intake or his mother’s for not being 28

around when she was needed. There were constant little wars of whose fault is it and okay I’m sorry and I wish he’d die and get it over with, all taking place in Richard’s inner mind.

He did the dumb joke thing of knocking on Bud’s door and saying, “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”

Nothing happened. He went in and saw Bud in a large open room sawing a two‐by‐four that he’d set between benches of unmatching height. The house was still mainly framework although Bud had been working for many months in a conscientious struggle that Richard thought had less to do with gutting and reshaping a house than destroying some dread specter, maybe Bud’s old drug habit, once and for all.

“Your phone’s out of order,” Richard said. “I thought I’d drive on out, see if everything, you know’s, okay.”

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

“I reported it to the phone company.”

“My only feeling about the phone.”

“Sometimes they correct the problem from the office.”

“It brings more grief than joy.”

Bud finally looked up and noted his visual presence.

“It brings personal voices into your life that you’re not prepared to deal with.”

Richard kept to the edges of the room, running his palms over the planed sills, examining the staples that kept plastic sheeting fastened to the window frames. It was empty distraction of the type that forestalls the pain of ordinary talk.

“I’m putting in parquet,” Bud said. “Herringbone maybe.”

“Should be good.”

“Better be good. But I probably won’t ever do it.”

The sound of the wind in the plastic sheeting was hard on the nerves. Richard wondered how an ex‐addict could work all day in this scratching and popping. The sheeting popped out, it whipped and scratched. Crack cocaine fools the brain into thinking dope is good for it.

He thought of something he could say.

“Tell you, Bud. I’m forty‐two years old next week. Week from Thursday.”

“It happens.”

“And I still feel like I’m half that, pretty much.”

“That’s because it’s obvious why, you living as you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“With your folks,” Bud said. 29

“They can’t manage alone.”

“Who can? my question to you is.”

Bud tossed half the length of sawed wood into a corner. He studied the other half as if someone had just handed it to him on a crowded street.

“What?” Richard said.

“Don’t they smell?”

“What?”

“Old people, like bad milk.”

Richard heard the plastic windows pop.

“Not so I notice.”

“Not so you notice. Okay. You want to feel your correct age. Get yourself a wife. That’ll do it for you. It’s horrible but true. A wife is the only thing that can save guys like us. But they don’t make you feel any younger.”

Richard fidgeted happily in his corner. He liked the idea of being included in the female salvation of wayward men.

How does Delillo use dialogue to explore male friendship and masculinity in this extract?

American Pastoral – Philip Roth (1997)

The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair‐complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep‐jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue‐eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.

The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good‐twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer‐ but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else. Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community‐advanced degrees were. Nonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war.

The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.

And how did this affect him‐the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left‐field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone‐faced boy? Or was the mature‐seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the Swede. Unlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the 31

whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot‐stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashed. The cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a pass. Even at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first base. It was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah‐bah! Bah bah bah . . . bah‐bah! and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt‐billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloomers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyes . . . and not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede. "Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'!"

Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with him. The candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us "Hey‐you‐no!" or "Kid‐cut‐it‐out!"; him they called, respectfully, "Swede. Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as "Seymour. The chattering girls he passed on the street would ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, "Come back, come back, Levov of my life!" And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of all that love, looking as though he didn't feel a thing. Contrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling. In this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many‐as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school's servicemen home unscathed from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa‐there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility.

But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god. Either there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn't. His aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the school. He was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he'd broken the Weequahic basketball record‐by scoring twenty‐seven points against Barringer‐on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty‐eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak, and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from bombing Germany.

In this extract, how does Roth use the character of ‘The Swede’ to raise questions about the nature of the ‘American Dream’?

The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow (1953)

I’m an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

My own parents were not much to me, though I cared for my mother. She was simple‐minded, and what I learned from her was not what she taught, but on the order of object lessons. She didn’t have much to teach, poor woman. My brothers and I loved her. I speak for them both; for the elder it is safe enough; for the younger one, Georgie, I have to answer—he was born an idiot—but I’m in no need to guess, for he had a song he sang as he ran dragfooted with his stiff idiot’s trot, up and down along the curl‐wired fence in the backyard:

Georgie Mahchy, Augie, Simey

Winnie Mahchy, evwy, evwy love Mama.

He was right about everyone save Winnie, Grandma Lausch’s poodle, a pursy old overfed dog. Mama was Winnie’s servant, as she was Grandma Lausch’s. Loud‐breathing and wind‐breaking, she lay near the old lady’s stool on a cushion embroidered with a Berber aiming a rifle at a lion. She was personally Grandma’s, belonged to her suite; the rest of us were the governed, and especially Mama. Mama passed the dog’s dish to Grandma, and Winnie received her food at the old lady’s feet from the old lady’s hands. These hands and feet were small; she wore a shriveled sort of lisle on her legs and her slippers were gray—ah, the gray of that felt, the gray despotic to souls—with pink ribbons. Mama, however, had large feet, and around the house she wore men’s shoes, usually without strings, and a dusting or mobcap like somebody’s fanciful cotton effigy of the form of the brain. She was meek and long, round‐eyed like Georgie—gentle green

round eyes and a gentle freshness of color in her long face. Her hands were work‐reddened, she had very few of her teeth left—to heed the knocks as they come—and she and Simon wore the same ravelly coat‐ sweaters. Besides having round eyes, Mama had circular glasses that I went with her to the free dispensary on Harrison Street to get. Coached by Grandma Lausch, I went to do the lying. Now I know it wasn’t so necessary to lie, but then everyone thought so, and Grandma Lausch especially, who was one of those Machiavellis of small street and neighborhood that my young years were full of. So Grandma, who had it all ready before we left the house and must have put in hours plotting it out in thought and phrase, lying small in her chilly small room under the featherbed, gave it to me at breakfast. The idea was that Mama wasn’t keen enough to do it right. That maybe one didn’t need to be keen didn’t occur to us; it was a contest. The dispensary would want to know why the Charities didn’t pay for the glasses. So you must say nothing about the Charities, but that sometimes money from my father came and sometimes it didn’t, and that Mama took boarders. This was, in a delicate and choosy way, by ignoring and omitting certain large facts, true. It was true enough for them, and at the age of nine I could appreciate this perfectly. Better than my brother Simon, who was too blunt for this kind of maneuver and, anyway, from books, had gotten hold of some English schoolboy notions of honor. Tom Brown’s Schooldays for many years had an influence we were not in a position to afford.

Simon was a blond boy with big cheekbones and wide gray eyes and had the arms of a cricketer—I go by the illustrations; we never played anything but softball. Opposed to his British style was his patriotic anger at George III. The mayor was at that time ordering the schoolboard to get history books that dealt more harshly with the king, and Simon was very hot at Cornwallis. I admired this patriotic flash, his terrific personal wrath at the general, and his satisfaction over his surrender at Yorktown, which would often come over him at lunch while we ate our bologna sandwiches. Grandma had a piece of boiled chicken at noon, and sometimes there was the gizzard for bristleheaded little Georgie, who loved it and blew at the ridgy thing more to cherish than to cool it. But this martial true‐blood pride of Simon’s disqualified him for the crafty task to be done at the dispensary; he was too disdainful to lie and might denounce everybody instead. I could be counted on to do the job, because I enjoyed it. I loved a piece of strategy. I had enthusiasms too; I had Simon’s, though there was never much meat in Cornwallis for me, and I had Grandma Lausch’s as well. As for the truth of these statements I was instructed to make—well, it was a fact that we had a boarder. Grandma Lausch was our boarder, not a relation at all. She was supported by two sons, one from Cincinnati and one from Racine, Wisconsin. The daughters‐in‐law did not want her, and she, the widow of a powerful Odessa businessman—a divinity over us, bald, whiskery, with a fat nose, greatly armored in a cutaway, a double‐breasted vest, powerfully buttoned (his blue photo, enlarged and retouched by Mr. Lulov, hung in the parlor, doubled back between the portico columns of the full‐length mirror, the dome of the stove beginning where his trunk ended)—she preferred to live with us, because for so many years she was used to direct a house, to command, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise, and intrigue in all her languages. She boasted French and German besides Russian, Polish, and Yiddish; and who but Mr. Lulov, the retouch artist from Division Street, could have tested her claim to French? And he was a serene bogus too, that triple‐backboned gallant tea‐drinker. Except that he had been a hackie in Paris, once, and if he told the truth about that might have known French among other things, like playing tunes on his teeth with a pencil or singing and keeping time with a handful of coins that he rattled by jigging his thumb along the table, and how to play chess.

How does Bellow construct a narrator with the impression of psychological complexity and complication? 34

Do androids dream of electric sheep? – Philip K. Dick (1968)

“Do you have your ideology framed?” Phil Resch asked. “That would explain me as part of the human race?”

Rick said, “There is a defect in your empathic, role‐taking ability. One which we don’t test for. Your feelings towards androids.”

“Of course we don’t test for that.”

“Maybe we should.” He had never thought of it before, had never felt any empathy on his own part toward the androids he killed. Always he had assumed that throughout his psyche he experienced the android as a clever machine – as in his conscious view. And yet, in contrast to Phil Resch, a difference had manifested itself. And he felt instinctively that he was right. Empathy toward an artificial construct? he asked himself. Something that only pretends to be alive? But Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of a simulation.

“You realize,” Phil Resch said quietly, “what this would do. If we included androids in our range of empathic identification, as we do animals.”

“We couldn’t protect ourselves.”

“Absolutely. These Nexus‐6 types … they’d roll all over us and mash us flat. You and I, all the bounty hunters – we stand between the Nexus‐6 and mankind, a barrier which keeps the two distinct. Furthermore –” He ceased, noticing that Rick was once again hauling out his test gear. “I thought the test was over.”

“I want to ask myself a question,” Rick said. “And I want you to tell me what the needles register. Just give me the calibration; I can compute it.” He plastered the adhesive disk against his cheek, arranged the beam

of light until it fed directly into his eye. “Are you ready? Watch the dials. We’ll exclude time lapse in this; I just want magnitude.”

“Sure, Rick,” Phil Resch said obligingly.

Aloud, Rick said, “I’m going down by elevator with an android I’ve captured. And suddenly someone kills it, without warning.”

“No particular response,” Phi Resch said.

“What’d the needles hit?”

“The left one 2.8. The right one 3.3.”

Rick said, “A female android.”

“Now they’re up to 4.0 and 6, respectively.”

“That’s high enough,” Rick said; he removed the wired adhesive disk from his cheek and shut off the beam of light. “That’s an emphatically empathic response,” he said. “About what a human subject shows for most questions. Except for the extreme ones, such as those dealing with human pelts used decoratively … the truly pathological ones.”

“Meaning?”

Rick said, “I’m capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids. Not for all of them but – one or two.” For Luba Luft, as an example, he said to himself. So I was wrong. There’s nothing unnatural or unhuman about Phil Resch’s reactions; it’s me.

I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.

Of course, he reflected, this may never come up again in my work; it could be an anomaly, something for instance to do with my feelings for The Magic Flute. And for Luba’s voice, in fact her career as a whole. Certainly this had never come up before; or at least not that he had been aware of. Not, for example, with Polokov. Nor with Garland. And, he realized, if Phil Resch had proved out android, I could have killed him without feeling anything, anyhow after Luba’s death.

So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs. In that elevator at the museum, he said to himself, I rode down with two creatures, one human, the other android … and my feelings were the reverse of those intended. Of those I’m accustomed to feel – am required to feel.

“You’re in a spot, Deckard,” Phil Resch said; it seemed to amuse him.

Rick said, “What – should I do?”

“It’s sex,” Phil Resch said.

“Sex?”

“Because she – it – was physically attractive. Hasn’t that ever happened to you before?” Phi Resch laughed. “We were taught that it constitutes a prime problem in bounty hunting. Don’t you know, Deckard, that in the colonies they have android mistresses?”

“It’s illegal,” Rick said, knowing the law about that.

“Sure it’s illegal. But most variations in sex are illegal. But people do it anyhow.”

“What about – not sex – but love?”

“Love is another name for sex.”

“Like love of country,” Rick said. “Love of music.”

“If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android – nothing more, nothing less. I felt that way, on one occasion. When I had just started bounty hunting. Don’t let it get you down; you’ll heal. What’s happened is that you’ve got your order reversed. Don’t kill her – or be present when she’s killed – and then feel physically attracted. Do it the other way.”

Rick stared at him. “Go to bed with her first –”

“– and then kill her,” Phil Resch said succinctly. His grainy, hardened smile remained.

You’re a good bounty hunter, Rick realized. Your attitude proves it. But am I?

Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he had begun to wonder.

How does Dick use dialogue to raise questions about the nature of human sexuality and technology?

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (1966)

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert‐clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far Western than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch‐hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high‐heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see—simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main‐line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced “Ar‐kan‐sas”) River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign—Dance—but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window— HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in 1933, and it is one of the town’s two “apartment houses,” the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school’s faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb’s homes are one‐story frame affairs, with front porches.

Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling‐apart post office. The depot, itself, with its peeling sulphur‐colored paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super Chief, the El Captain go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do—only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one o which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a café—Hartman’s Café, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is “dry.”) 38

And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good‐looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and ably staffed “consolidated” school—the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away—are, in general, a prosperous people… The farm ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made not from farming alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural‐gas resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and swollen grain elevators.

Until one morning in mid‐November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in she shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life.

How does Capote’s description of Holcomb present issues related to place and belonging?

Sula ‐ Toni Morrison (1973)

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.

It was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish, frightened and bold — all at the same time.

In that mercury mood in July, Sula and Nel wandered about the Bottom barefoot looking for mischief. They decided to go down by the river where the boys sometimes swam. Nel waited on the porch of 7 Carpenter's Road while Sula ran into the house to go to the toilet. On the way up the stairs, she passed the kitchen where Hannah sat with two friends, Patsy and Valentine. The two women were fanning themselves and watching Hannah put down some dough, all talking casually about one thing and another, and had gotten around, when Sula passed by, to the problems of child rearing.

"They a pain."

"Yeh. Wish I'd listened to mamma. She told me not to have 'em too soon."

"Any time atall is too soon for me."

"Oh, I don't know. My Rudy minds his daddy. He just wild with me. Be glad when he growed and gone."

Hannah smiled and said, "Shut your mouth. You love the ground he pee on."

"Sure I do. But he still a pain. Can't help loving your own child. No matter what they do."

"Well, Hester grown now and I can't say love is exactly what I feel."

"Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference." 40

"Guess so. Likin' them is another thing."

"Sure. They different people, you know ..."

She only heard Hannah's words, and the pronouncement sent her flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she stood at the window fingering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye. Nel's call floated up and into the window, pulling her away from dark thoughts back into the bright, hot daylight.

/‐ ‐ ‐/

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. An absence so decorative, so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent presence.

The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.

Then one day, burrowing in a dresser drawer, she found what she had been looking for: proof that he had been there, his driver's license. It contained just what she needed for verification — his vital statistics: Born 1901, height 5'11", weight 152 lbs., eyes brown, hair black, color black. Oh yes, skin black. Very black. So black that only a steady careful rubbing with steel wool would remove it, and as it was removed there was the glint of gold leaf and under the gold leaf the cold alabaster and deep, deep down under the cold alabaster more black only this time the black of warm loam.

But what was this? Albert Jacks? His name was Albert Jacks? A. Jacks. She had thought it was Ajax. All those years. Even from the time she walked by the pool hall and looked away from him sitting astride a wooden chair, looked away to keep from seeing the wide space of intolerable orderliness between his legs; the openness that held no sign, no sign at all, of the animal that lurked in his trousers; looked away from the insolent nostrils and the smile that kept slipping and falling, falling, falling so she wanted to reach out with her hand to catch it before it fell to the pavement and was sullied by the cigarette butts and bottle caps and spittle at his feet and the feet of other men who sat or stood around outside the pool hall, calling, singing out to her and Nel and grown women too with lyrics like pig meat and brown sugar and jailbait and O Lord, what have I done to deserve the wrath, and Take me, Jesus, I have seen the promised land, and Do, Lord, remember me in voices mellowed by hopeless passion into gentleness. Even then, when she and Nel were trying hard not to dream of him and not to think of him when they touched the softness in their underwear or undid their braids as soon as they left home to let the hair bump and wave around their ears, or wrapped the cotton binding around their chests so the nipples would not break through their blouses and give him cause to smile his slipping, falling smile, which brought the blood rushing to their skin. And even later, when for the first time in her life she had lain in bed with a man and said his name involuntarily or said it truly meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not his at all. 41

Sula stood with a worn slip of paper in her fingers and said aloud to no one, "I didn't even know his name. And if I didn't know his name, then there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn't even know his name.

"When I was a little girl the heads of my paper dolls came off, and it was a long time before I discovered that my own head would not fall off if I bent my neck. I used to walk around holding it very stiff because I thought a strong wind or a heavy push would snap my neck. Nel was the one who told me the truth. But she was wrong. I did not hold my head stiff enough when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls.

"It's just as well he left. Soon I would have torn the flesh from his face just to see if I was right about the gold and nobody would have understood that kind of curiosity. They would have believed that I wanted to hurt him just like the little boy who fell down the steps and broke his leg and the people think I pushed him just because I looked at it."

Holding the driver's license she crawled into bed and fell into a sleep full of dreams of cobalt blue.

When she awoke, there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. "Perhaps I made it up," she thought. Then it came to her — the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, "There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are." She lay down again on the bed and sang a little wandering tune made up of the words I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are until, touched by her own lullaby, she grew drowsy, and in the hollow of near‐sleep she tasted the acridness of gold, left the chill of alabaster and smelled the dark, sweet stench of loam.

In the extract, how does Morrison present women and ideas about femininity through dialogue and close third person narration?

Loot ‐ Nadine Gordimer (2003)

Once upon our time, there was an earthquake: but this one is the most powerful ever recorded since the invention of the Richter scale made possible for us to measure apocalyptic warnings.

It tipped a continental shelf. These tremblings often cause floods; this colossus did the reverse, drew back the ocean as a vast breath taken. The most secret level of our world lay revealed: the sea‐bedded ‐ wrecked ships, facades of houses, ballroom candelabra, toilet bowl, pirate chest, TV screen, mail‐coach, aircraft fuselage, canon, marble torso, Kalashnikov, metal carapace of a tourist bus‐load, baptismal font, automatic dishwasher, computer, swords sheathed in barnacles, coins turned to stone. The astounded gaze raced among these things; the population who had fled from their toppling houses to the martime hills, ran down. Where terrestrial crash and bellow had terrified them, there was naked silence. The saliva of the sea glistened upon these objects; it is given that time does not, never did, exist down there where the materiality of the past and the present as they lie has no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing ‐ or all is possessible at once.

People rushed to take; take, take. This was ‐ when, anytime, sometime ‐ valuable, that might be useful, what was this, well someone will know, that must have belonged to the rich, it's mine now, if you don't grab what's over there someone else will, feet slipped and slithered on seaweed and sank in soggy sand, gasping sea‐plants gaped at them, no‐one remarked there were no fish, the living inhabitants of this unearth had been swept up and away with the water. The ordinary opportunity of looting shops which was routine to people during the political uprisings was no comparison. Orgiastic joy gave men, women and their children strength to heave out of the slime and sand what they did not know they wanted, quickened their staggering gait as they ranged, and this was more than profiting by happenstance, it was robbing the power of nature before which they had fled helpless. Take, take; while grabbing they were able to forget the wreck of their houses and the loss of time‐bound possessions there. They had tattered the silence with their shouts to one another and under these cries like the cries of the absent seagulls they did not hear a distant approach of sound rising as a great wind does. And then the sea came back, engulfed them to add to its treasury.

That is what is known; in television coverage that really had nothing to show but the pewter skin of the depths, in radio interviews with those few infirm, timid or prudent who had not come down from the hills, and in newspaper accounts of bodies that for some reason the sea rejected, washed up down the coast 43 somewhere.

But the writer knows something no‐one else knows; the sea‐change of the imagination.

Now listen, there's a man who has wanted a certain object (what) all his life. He has a lot of ‐ things ‐ some of which his eye falls upon often, so he must be fond of, some of which he doesn't notice, deliberately, that he probably shouldn't have acquired but cannot cast off, there's an art noveau lamp he reads by, and above his bed‐head a Japanese print, a Hokusai, 'The Great Wave', he doesn't really collect oriental stuff, although if it had been on the wall facing him it might have been more than part of the furnishings, it's been out of sight behind his head for years. All these ‐ things ‐ but not the one.

He's a retired man, long divorced, chosen an old but well‐appointed villa in the maritime hills as the site from which to turn his back on the assault of the city. A woman from the village cooks and cleans and doesn't bother him with any other communication. It is a life blessedly freed of excitement, he's had enough of that kind of disturbance, pleasurable or not, but the sight from his lookout of what could never have happened, never ever have been vouchsafed, is a kind of command. He is one of those who are racing out over the glistening sea‐bed, the past ‐ detritus‐treasure, one and the same ‐ stripped bare.

Like all the other looters with whom he doesn't mix, has nothing in common, he races from object to object, turning over the shards of painted china, the sculptures created by destruction, abandonment and rust, the brine‐vintaged wine casks, a plunged racing motorcycle, a dentist's chair, his stride landing on disintegrated human ribs and metatarsals he does not identify. But unlike the others, he takes nothing ‐ until: there, ornate with tresses of orange‐brown seaweed, stuck‐fast with nacreous shells and crenellations of red coral, is the object. (A mirror?) It's as if the impossible is true; he knew that was where it was, beneath the sea, that's why he didn't know what it was, could never find it before. It could be revealed only by something that had never happened, the greatest paroxysm of our earth ever measured on the Richter scale.

He takes it up, the object, the mirror, the sand pours off it, the water that was the only bright glance left to it streams from it, he is taking it back with him, taking possession at last.

And the great wave comes from behind his bed‐head and takes him.

His name well‐known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found. Who recognized them, that day, where they lie?

No carnation or rose floats.

Full fathom five.

In this extract, how does Gordimer mix literary genres to comment upon Western consumerism?

Fearing and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson (1971)

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. ..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than 100 miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our soundproof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip ... and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high‐powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi‐colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high‐speed driving all over Los Angeles County – from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that

for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now – yes, it was time for a long snort of ether. And then do the next 100 miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on ether is to do up a lot of amyls – not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at 90 miles an hour through Barstow.

"Man, this is the way to travel," said my attorney. He leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along with the rhythm section and kind of moaning the words: "One toke over the line ... Sweet Jesus ... One toke over the line ..."

One toke? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio ... slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with a tape recorder turned all the way up on "Sympathy for the Devil." That was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And also to maintain our rhythm on the road. A constant speed is good for gas mileage – and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about gas consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag blood to the back of the brain.

In this extract, how does Thompson use language to construct an unreliable narrator? How does this challenge our usual expectations of journalism and reportage?

Mother – Maxim Gorky (1906)

"Comrades, it would be well to write to them over there! Let them know that they have friends living in far‐away Russia, workingmen who confess and believe in the same religion as they, comrades who pursue the same aims as they, and who rejoice in their victories!"

And all, with smiles on their faces dreamily spoke at length of the Germans, the Italians, the Englishmen, and the Swedes, of the working people of all countries, as of their friends, as of people near to their hearts, whom without seeing they loved and respected, whose joys they shared, whose pain they felt.

In the small room a vast feeling was born of the universal kinship of the workers of the world, at the same time its masters and its slaves, who had already been freed from the bondage of prejudice and who felt themselves the new masters of life. This feeling blended all into a single soul; it moved the mother, and, although inaccessible to her, it straightened and emboldened her, as it were, with its force, with its joys, with its triumphant, youthful vigor, intoxicating, caressing, full of hope.

"What queer people you are!" said the mother to the Little Russian one day. "All are your comrades‐‐the Armenians and the Jews and the Austrians. You speak about all as of your friends; you grieve for all, and you rejoice for all!"

"For all, mother dear, for all! The world is ours! The world is for the workers! For us there is no nation, no race. For us there are only comrades and foes. All the workingmen are our comrades; all the rich, all the authorities are our foes. When you see how numerous we workingmen are, how tremendous the power of the spirit in us, then your heart is seized with such joy, such happiness, such a great holiday sings in your bosom! And, mother, the Frenchman and the German feel the same way when they look upon life, and the Italian also. We are all children of one mother‐‐the great, invincible idea of the brotherhood of the workers of all countries over all the earth. This idea grows, it warms us like the sun; it is a second sun in the heaven of justice, and this heaven resides in the workingman's heart. Whoever he be, whatever his name, a socialist is our brother in spirit now and always, and through all the ages forever and ever!"

In this extract, how does Gorky present political commitment and the radical message of the novel?

Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (1966)

That was the third time I had my dream, and it ended. I know now that the flight of steps leads to this room where I lie watching the woman asleep with her head on her arms. In my dream I waited till she began to snore, then I got up, took the keys and let myself out with a candle in my hand. It was easier this time than ever before and I walked as though I were flying.

Then I imagined that I heard a footstep and I thought what will they say, what will they do if they find me here? I held my right wrist with my left hand and waited. But it was nothing. I was very tired after this. Very tired. I wanted to get out of the room but my own candle had burned down and I took one of the others. Suddenly I was in Aunt Cora’s room. I saw the sunlight coming through the window, the tree outside and the shadows of the leaves on the floor, but I saw the wax candles too and I hated them. So I knocked them all down. Most of them went out but one caught the thin curtains that were behind the red ones. I laughed when I saw the lovely colour spreading so fast, but I did not stay to watch it. It was then that I saw her — the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her. I dropped the candle I was carrying and it caught the end of a tablecloth and I saw flames shoot up. As I ran or perhaps floated or flew I called help me Christophine help me and looking behind me I saw that I had been helped. There was a wall of fire protecting me but it was too hot, it scorched me and I went away from it.

I ran up the last flight of stairs and along the passage. I passed the room where they brought me yesterday or the day before yesterday, I don’t remember. Perhaps it was quite long ago for I seemed to know the house quite well. I knew how to get away from the heat and the shouting, for there was shouting now. When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don’t know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it. I saw the grandfather clock and Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colour, I saw the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames.

I saw the chandelier and the red carpet downstairs and the bamboos and the tree ferns, the gold ferns and the silver and the soft green velvet of the moss on the garden wall. I saw my doll’s house and the books and the picture of the Miller’s Daughter. I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, Qui est lá? Qui est lá? and the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha! The wind caught my hair and it 48

streamed out like wings. It might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones. But when I looked over the edge I saw the pool at Coulibri. Tia was there. She beckoned to me and when I hesitated, she laughed. I heard her say, You frightened? And I heard the man’s voice, Bertha! Bertha! All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second. And the sky so red. Someone screamed and I thought, Why did I scream? I called ‘Tia!’ and jumped and woke.

Grace Poole was sitting at the table but she had heard the scream too, for she said, ‘What was that?’ She got up, came over and looked at me. I lay still, breathing evenly with my eyes shut. ‘I must have been dreaming,’ she said. Then she went back, not to the table but to her bed. I waited a long time after I heard her snore, then I got up, took the keys and unlocked the door. I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage.

How does Rhys present the power of dreams and dreaming in this extract? How does this position the narrator in relation to the reader?

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison (1952)

Now I have one radio‐phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ – all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well‐digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time. So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slaveowners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more rapid tempo and I heard someone shout:

‘Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the “Blackness of Blackness.” ’

And a congregation of voices answered: ‘That blackness is most black, brother, most black . . .’

In this extract, how does Ellison use anecdote to explore issues of racial identity and Black American experience?

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon (1973)

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall‐‐soon‐‐it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half‐silvered images in a view finder, green‐stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city....

They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into‐‐they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no trafflc came through, of the coral‐like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling‐stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter 52

and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.

The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they have come here.... Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang from under the fancy iron eaves, unlit for centuries . . . the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles . . . velvet black surfaces contain the movement: the smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold plaster where all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave‐painting, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls . . . the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator‐a moving wood scaffold open on all sides, hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast‐iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss. At each brown floor, passengers move on and off . . . thousands of these hushed rooms without light....

Some wait alone, some share their invisible rooms with others. Invisible, yes, what do the furnishings matter, at this stage of things? Underfoot crunches the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened, lied to its children. Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save ‐ou, old fellow...."

There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after?

But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this while, light has come percolating in, along with the cold morning air flowing now across his nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching empty or near‐empty bottles, here draped over a chair, there huddled into a cold fireplace, or sprawled on various divans, un‐Hoovered rugs and chaise longues down the different levels of the enormous room, snoring and wheezing at many rhythms, in self‐renewing chorus, as London light, winter and elastic light, grows between the faces of the mullioned windows, grows among the strata of last night's smoke still hung, fading, from the waxed beams of the ceiling. All these horizontal here, these comrades in arms, look just as rosy as a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of their certain resurrection in the next few minutes.

His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice. He is wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal.

How does Pynchon use particular sentence structures to produce feelings of dislocation, loss and alienation?

If on a winter’s night a traveller – Italo Calvino (1979)

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice‐‐ they won't hear you otherwise‐‐"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse's mane, or maybe tied to the horse's ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for reading; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion. on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to , put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you're absorbed in reading there will b no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now 54

everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. but not you. you know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter's night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In this extract, how does Calvino challenge our expectations of the novel form and draw our attention to the act of reading itself? What role does the unusual second person narrative play in this?

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy O’Toole (1980)

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.

Ignatius himself was dressed comfortably and sensibly. The hunting cap prevented head colds. The voluminous tweed trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion. Their pleats and nooks contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed Ignatius. The plaid flannel shirt made a jacket unnecessary while the muffler guarded exposed Reilly skin between earflap and collar. The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life.

Shifting from one hip to the other in his lumbering, elephantine fashion, Ignatius sent waves of flesh rippling beneath the tweed and flannel, waves that broke upon buttons and seams. Thus rearranged, he contemplated the long while that he had been waiting for his mother. Principally he considered the discomfort he was beginning to feel. It seemed as if his whole being was ready to burst from his swollen suede desert boots, and, as if to verify this, Ignatius turned his singular eyes toward his feet. The feet did indeed look swollen. He was prepared to offer the sight of those bulging boots to his mother as evidence of her thoughtlessness. Looking up, he saw the sun beginning to descend over the Mississippi at the foot of Canal Street. The Holmes clock said almost five. Already he was polishing a few carefully worded

accusations designed to reduce his mother to repentance or, at least, confusion. He often had to keep her in her place.

She had driven him downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor’s seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein’s for his trumpet and a new string for his lute. Then he had wandered into the Penny Arcade on Royal Street to see whether any new games had been installed. He had been disappointed to find the miniature mechanical baseball game gone. Perhaps it was only being repaired. The last time that he had played it the batter would not work and, after some argument, the management had returned his nickel, even though the Penny Arcade people had been base enough to suggest that Ignatius had himself broken the baseball machine by kicking it.

Concentrating upon the fate of the miniature baseball machine, Ignatius detached his being from the physical reality of Canal Street and the people around him and therefore did not notice the two eyes that were hungrily watching him from behind one of D. H. Holmes’ pillars, two sad eyes shining with hope and desire.

In this extract, how does O’Toole deploy irony to construct a detached and wry narratorial voice? How does this compare with the narratorial voices in other extracts?

White Teeth – Zadie Smith (1999)

…Click‐slam. Click‐slam. One Magid, one Irie. Samad opened his eyes and looked in the rear‐view mirror. In the back seat were the two children he had been waiting for: both with their little glasses, Irie with her wilful Afro (not a pretty child: she had got her genes mixed up, Archie’s nose with Clara’s awfully buck teeth), Magid with his thick black hair slicked into an unappealing middle‐parting. Magid carrying a recorder, Irie with violin. But beyond these basic details, everything was not as it should be. Unless he was very much mistaken, something was rotten in this Mini Metro – something was afoot. Both children were dressed in black from head to toe. Both wore white armbands on their left arms upon which were painted crude renditions of baskets of vegetables. Both had pads of writing paper and a pen tied around their necks with string.

“Who did this to you?”

Silence.

“Was it Amma? And Mrs Jones?”

Silence.

“Magid! Irie! Cat got your tongues?”

More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

“Millat, do you know what this is about?”

“Sboring,” whined Millat. “They’re just being clever, clever, snotty, dumb‐bum, Lord Magoo and Mrs Ugly Poo.”

Samad twisted in his car seat to face the two dissenters. “Am I meant to ask you what this is about?”

Magid grasped his pen and, in his neat, clinical hand, printed: IF YOU WANT TO, then ripped off the piece of paper and handed it to Samad.

“A Vow of Silence. I see. You too, Irie? I would have thought you were too sensible for such nonsense.” 58

Irie scribbled for a moment on her pad and passed the missive forward. WE ARE PROSTESTING.

“Pros‐testing? What are Pros and why are you testing them? Did your mother teach you this word?”

Irie looked like she was going to burst with the sheer force of her explanation, but Magid mimed the zipping up of her mouth, snatched back the piece of paper and crossed out the first s.

“Oh, I see. Protesting.”

Magid and Irie nodded maniacally.

“Well, that is indeed fascinating. And I suppose your mothers engineered this whole scenario? The costumes? The notepads?”

Silence.

“You are quite the political prisoners… not giving a thing away. All right: may one ask what it is that you are protesting about?”

Both children pointed urgently to their armbands.

“Vegetables? You are protesting for the rights of vegetables?”

Irie held one hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming the answer, while Magid set about his writing pad in a flurry. WE ARE PROTESTING ABOUT THE HARVEST FESTIVAL.

Samad growled, “I told you already. I don’t want you participating in that nonsense. It has nothing to do with us, Magid. Why are you always trying to be somebody you are not?”

There was a mutual, silent anger as each acknowledged the painful incident that was being referred to. A few months earlier, on Magid’s ninth birthday, a group of very nice‐looking white boys with meticulous manners had turned up on the doorstep and asked for Mark Smith.

“Mark? No Mark here,” Alsana had said, bending down to their level with a genial smile. “Only the family Iqbal in here. You have the wrong house.”

But before she had finished the sentence, Magid had dashed to the door, ushering his mother out of view.

“Hi, guys.”

“Hi, Mark.”

“Off to the chess club, Mum.”

“Yes, M – M – Mark,” said Alsana, close to tears at this final snub, the replacement of “Mum” for “Amma”. “Do not be late, now.”

“I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MUBTASIM IQBAL!” Samad had yelled after Magid when he returned home that evening and whipped up the stairs like a bullet to hide in his room. “AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK SMITH!”

But this was just a symptom of a far deeper malaise. Magid really wanted to be in some other family. He wanted to own cats and not cockroaches, he wanted his mother to make the music of the cello, not the sound of the sewing machine; he wanted to have a trellis of flowers growing up one side of the house instead of the ever growing pile of other people’s rubbish; he wanted a piano in the hallway in place of the broken door off cousin Kurshed’s car; he wanted to go on biking holidays to France, not day‐trips to Blackpool to visit aunties; he wanted the floor of his room to be shiny wood, not the orange and green swirled carpet left over from the restaurant; he wanted his father to be a doctor, not a one‐handed waiter; and this month Magid had converted all these desires into a wish to join in with the Harvest Festival like Mark Smith would. Like everybody else would.

BUT WE WANT TO DO IT. OR WE’LL GET A DETENTION. MRS OWENS SAID IT IS TRADITION.

Samad blew his top. “Whose tradition?” he bellowed, as a tearful Magid began to scribble frantically once more. “Dammit, you are a Muslim, not a wood sprite! I told you, Magid, I told you the condition upon which you would be allowed. You come with me on haj. If I am to touch that black stone before I die I will do it with my eldest son by my side.”

Magid broke the pencil halfway through his reply, scrawling the second half with blunt lead. IT’S NOT FAIR! I CAN’T GO ON HAJ. I’VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT’S NOT FAIR!

In this extract, how does Smith explore the importance of ethnic and cultural identity through names and naming?

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson (1985)

Explore the significance of moral attitudes in this extract.

Remember to include in your answer relevant detailed analysis of the ways that Winterson shapes meanings.

The Heathen were a daily household preoccupation. My mother found them everywhere, particularly Next Door. They tormented her as only the godless can, but she had her methods. They hated hymns, and she liked to play the piano, an old upright with pitted candelabra and yellow keys. We each had a copy of the Redemption Hymnal (boards and cloth 3 shillings). My mother sang the tune, and I put in the harmonies. The first hymn I ever learned was a magnificent Victorian composition called Ask the Saviour to Help You.

One Sunday morning, just as we got in from Communion, we heard strange noises, like cries for help, coming from Next Door. I took no notice, but my mother froze behind the radiogram, and started to change colour. Mrs White, who had come home with us to listen to the World Service, immediately crushed her ear against the wall.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said in a loud whisper, ‘but whatever it is, it’s not holy.’

Still my mother didn’t move.

‘Have you got a wine glass?’ urged Mrs White.

My mother looked horrified.

‘For medicinal purposes, I mean,’ added Mrs White hurriedly.

My mother went into a high cupboard, and reached down a box from the top shelf. This was her War Cupboard, and every week she bought a new tin to put in it, in case of the Holocaust. Mostly it was full of black cherries in syrup and special offer sardines.

‘I never use these,’ she said meaningfully.

‘Neither do I,’ said Mrs White defensively, clamping herself back against the wall. While my mother was covering up the television, Mrs White slithered up and down the skirting board.

‘We’ve just had that wall decorated,’ my mother pointed out.

‘It’s stopped anyway,’ panted Mrs White.

At that moment another burst of wailing began from Next Door.

Very clear this time.

‘They’re fornicating,’ cried my mother, rushing to put her hands over my ears.

‘Get off,’ I yelled.

The dog started barking, and my dad, who had been on nights the Saturday just gone, came down in his pyjama bottoms.

‘Put some clothes on,’ shrieked my mother, ‘Next Door’s at it again.’

I bit my mother’s hand. ‘Let go of my ears, I can hear it too.’

‘On a Sunday,’ exclaimed Mrs White.

Outside, suddenly, the ice‐cream van.

‘Go and get two cornets, and a wafer for Mrs White,’ ordered my mother, stuffing 10 shillings into my hand.

I ran off. I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught. I bought the ice‐ creams and decided to take my time. When I got back my mother had opened the piano, and she and Mrs White were looking through the Redemption Hymnal.

I passed round the ice‐creams.

‘It’s stopped,’ I said brightly.

‘For the moment,’ said my mother grimly.

As soon as we had finished, my mother wiped her hands on her apron.

‘Ask the Saviour to Help You, we’ll sing that. Mrs White, you be the baritone.’

The first verse was very fine I thought:

‘Yield not to Temptation, for yielding is sin,

Each Victory will help you some other to win.

Fight manfully onwards, Dark Passions subdue,

Look over to Jesus. He will carry you through.’

The hymn had a rousing chorus that moved my mother to such an extent that she departed entirely from the notation of the Redemption Hymnal, and instead wrought her own huge chords that sounded the length of the piano. No note was exempt. By the time we got to verse 3, Next Door had started to bang on the wall.

‘Listen to the Heathen,’ my mother shouted jubilantly, her foot furious on the hard pedal.

‘Sing it again.’

And we did, while the Heathen, driven mad by the Word, rushed away to find what blunt instruments they could to pound the wall from the other side. Some of them ran into the back yard and yelled over the wall. ‘Stop that bloody racket.’

‘On a Sunday too,’ tutted Mrs White, aghast.

My mother leapt from the keys and rushed into our back yard to quote the scripture. She found herself staring at the eldest son who had a lot of spots.

‘The Lord help me,’ she prayed, and a piece of Deuteronomy flashed into her mind:

‘The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt, and with the ulcers and the scurvy and the itch of which you cannot be cured.’ (Revised Standard Version.)

Then she ran back inside and slammed the back door.

‘Now then,’ she smiled, ‘who’s for a bit of dinner?’

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (1997)

Explore the significance of identity in this extract.

Remember to include in your answer relevant detailed analysis of the ways that Roy shapes meanings.

After Ammu died (after the last time she came back to Ayemenem, swollen with cortisone and a rattle in her chest that sounded like a faraway man shouting), Rahel drifted. From school to school. She spent her holidays in Ayemenem, largely ignored by Chacko and Mammachi (grown soft with sorrow, slumped in their bereavement like a pair of drunks in a toddy bar) and largely ignoring Baby Kochamma. In matters related to the raising of Rahel, Chacko and Mammachi tried, but couldn’t. They provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.

The Loss of Sophie Mol stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mammachi’s violin case. In the scabs of the sores on Chacko’s shins that he constantly worried. In his slack, womanish legs.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol (the seeker of small wisdoms: Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky? The harbinger of harsh reality: You’re both whole wogs and I’m a half one. The guru of gore: I’ve seen a man in an accident with his eyeball swinging on the end of a nerve, like a yo‐yo) slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a Government job. It ushered Rahel through childhood (from school to school) into womanhood.

Rahel was first blacklisted in Nazareth Convent at the age of eleven, when she was caught outside her Housemistress’s garden gate decorating a knob of fresh cowdung with small flowers. At Assembly the next morning she was made to look up depravity in the Oxford Dictionary and read aloud its meaning. ‘The quality or condition of being depraved or corrupt,’ Rahel read, with a row of stern‐mouthed nuns seated behind her and a sea of sniggering schoolgirl faces in front. ‘Perverted quality: Moral perversion; The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin; Both the elect and the non‐elect come into the world in a state of total d. and alienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing but sin. J. H. Blunt.’

Six months later she was expelled after repeated complaints from senior girls. She was accused (quite rightly) of hiding behind doors and deliberately colliding with her seniors. When she was questioned by the Principal about her behaviour (cajoled, caned, starved), she eventually admitted that she had done it to find out whether breasts hurt. In that Christian institution, breasts were not acknowledged. They weren’t supposed to exist, and if they didn’t could they hurt?

That was the first of three expulsions. The second for smoking. The third for setting fire to her housemistress’s false hair bun which, under duress, Rahel confessed to having stolen. In each of the schools she went to, the teachers noted that she:

(a) was an extremely polite child. 64

(b) had no friends.

It appeared to be a civil, solitary form of corruption. And for this very reason, they all agreed (savouring their teacherly disapproval, touching it with their tongues, sucking it like a sweet) – all the more serious.

It was, they whispered to each other, as though she didn’t know how to be a girl.

They weren’t far off the mark.

Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.

Rahel grew up without a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon.

So as long as she wasn’t noisy about it, she remained free to make her own enquiries: into breasts and how much they hurt. Into false hair buns and how well they burned. Into life and how it ought to be lived.

The Help – Kathryn Stockett (2009)

Explore the significance of rebellion in this extract.

Remember to include in your answer relevant detailed analysis of the ways that Stockett shapes meanings.

Everybody’s looking over at us thinking I must be getting fired or something.

‘Yes ma’m,’ I sigh. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I have an idea. Something I want to write about. But I need your help.’

I let all my breath out. I like Miss Skeeter, but come on. Sure, a phone call would a been nice. She never would a just shown up on some white lady’s step without calling. But no, she done plopped herself down like she got ever right to barge in on me at home.

‘I want to interview you. About what it’s like to work as a maid.’

A red ball roll a few feet in my yard. The little Jones boy run across the street to get it. When he see Miss Skeeter, he stop dead. Then he run and snatch it up. He turn and dash off like he scared she gone get him.

‘Like the Miss Myrna column?’ I say, flat as a pan. ‘Bout cleaning?’

‘Not like Miss Myrna. I’m talking about a book,’ she say and her eyes is big. She excited. ‘Stories about what it’s like to work for a white family. What it’s like to work for, say… Elizabeth.’

I turn and look at her. This what she been trying to ask me the past two weeks in Miss Leefolt kitchen. ‘You think Miss Leefolt gone agree to that? Me telling stories about her?’

Miss Skeeter’s eyes drop down some. ‘Well, no. I was thinking we wouldn’t tell her. I’ll have to make sure the other maids will agree to keep it secret, too.’

I scrunch up my forehead, just starting to get what she’s asking. ‘Other maids?’

‘I was hoping to get four or five. To really show what it’s like to be a maid in Jackson.’

I look around. We out here in the wide open. Don’t she know how dangerous this could be, talking about this while the whole world can see us? ‘Exactly what kind a stories you think you gone hear?’

‘What you get paid, how they treat you, the bathrooms, the babies, all things you’ve seen, good and bad.’

She looks excited, like this is some kind a game. For a second, I think I might be more mad than I am tired.

‘Miss Skeeter,’ I whisper, ‘do that not sound kind a dangerous to you?’

‘Not if we’re careful –‘

‘Shhh, please. Do you not know what would happen to me if Miss Leefolt find out I talked behind her back?’

‘We won’t tell her, or anyone.’ She lowers her voice some, but not enough.

‘These will be private interviews.’

I just stare at her. Is she crazy? ‘Did you hear about the colored boy this morning? One they beat with a tire iron for accidentally using the white bathroom?’

She just look at me, blink a little. ‘I know things are unstable but this is ‐'

‘And my cousin Shinelle in Cauter County? They burn up her car cause she went down to the voting station.’

‘No one’s ever written a book like this,’ she say, finally whispering, finally starting to understand, I guess. ‘We’d be breaking new ground. It’s a brand‐new perspective.’

I spot a flock of maids in they uniforms walking by my house. They look over, see me setting with a white woman on my front step. I grit my teeth, already know my phone gone be ringing tonight.

‘Miss Skeeter,’ and I say it slow, try to make it count, ‘I do this with you, I might as well burn my own house down.’

Miss Skeeter start biting her nail then. ‘But I’ve already…’ She shut her eyes closed tight. I think about asking her, Already what, but I’m kind a scared to hear what she gone say. She reach in her pocketbook, pull out a scrap a paper and write her telephone number on it.

‘Please, will you at least think about it?’

I sigh, stare out at the yard. Gentle as I can, I say ‘No ma’am.’

She set the scrap a paper between us on the step, then she get in her Cadillac. I’m too tired to get up. I just stay there, watch while she roll real slow down the road. The boys playing ball clear the street, stand on the side frozen, like it’s a funeral car passing by.