Take this Exam: A-Level English Literature: Drama and Prose | Zestly

Question 1

In Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre', the narrator says: 'I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.' What is the effect of this first-person narrative voice?

Accepted Answer

It creates a strong sense of intimacy and subjective truth for the reader.

Answer

It provides an objective, omniscient view of all characters' thoughts.

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It distances the reader from the protagonist's emotional struggle.

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It suggests that the narrator is unreliable and hiding the truth.

Question 2

In Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations', Pip says of his visit to Satis House: 'I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair.' What narrative technique is at work?

Accepted Answer

A retrospective first-person narrator: the older Pip reporting what his younger self began to feel, so that the reader can see where the shame came from even though the boy could not.

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An omniscient narrator, judging Pip's character from outside the story.

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Free indirect style, blending the narrator's voice with the unspoken thoughts of a third-person character.

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An unreliable narrator, concealing from the reader the truth about his own past.

Question 3

Charles Dickens's 'Bleak House' opens: 'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping.' Dickens keeps going in the same manner for another page, and the fog is at its very densest around the Court of Chancery. What is the setting doing?

Accepted Answer

It makes a physical condition stand for a legal one: the fog is densest where the Court sits, so obscurity becomes the novel's subject rather than its weather.

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It is realist scene-setting and nothing more: London did have fogs, and the novel begins inside one.

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It is Gothic, fog being a conventional marker of the supernatural.

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It proves the narrator unreliable, since no fog could cover an entire city at once.

Question 4

Consider this invented passage: 'The old house stood on the cliff, its windows like sightless eyes watching the sea. Inside, the shadows seemed to move of their own accord.' What makes this text Gothic?

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The focus on realistic social interactions between characters.

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The use of a first-person narrator to provide a rational explanation.

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The use of an ominous setting and the suggestion of supernatural forces.

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The emphasis on the protagonist's education and moral development.

Question 5

In Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre', Bertha Mason is kept locked in an attic and is described in terms usually reserved for an animal. A feminist critic and a postcolonial critic both write about her. What best describes the difference between the two readings?

Answer

The feminist reading treats Bertha as female anger confined by a marriage that gave her no standing; the postcolonial reading asks what it means that the woman so confined is Creole, brought to England from Jamaica, and that her family's money is what made Rochester's position possible.

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The feminist reading is about Bertha and the postcolonial reading is about Rochester.

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The feminist reading accepts the novel's judgement of Bertha, while the postcolonial reading rejects the novel as unreadable.

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There is no real difference: both conclude that Brontë intended Bertha as a warning against marrying in haste.