Writing Unseen Commentaries: A Student Help Book

Contents and Sample Section

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CONTENTS

 

The Purpose of this Book  

Introductory Passages

  1

       

PASSAGE 1:   

from Maiden Voyage, Denton Welch

  4

PASSAGE 2: 

Testing the Reality, Tony Harrison

  7

Section One: Standard Level Passages

 10

Part 1: A Focus on Setting

 10

PASSAGE 3:

from The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

 10

PASSAGE 4:

My Father's Garden, David Wagoner

 16

Part 2: A Focus on Character

 20

PASSAGE 5:

from The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope

 20

PASSAGE 6:

Walter Llywarch, R S Thomas

 26

Part 3: A Focus on Action

 32

PASSAGE 7:

from A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

 32

PASSAGE 8:

The Interrogation, Edwin Muir

 36

Part 4: A Focus on Style

 39

PASSAGE 9:

Source Unknown

 39

PASSAGE 10:

from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron

 43

Part 5: A Focus on Ideas

 49

PASSAGE 11:

from The Open Boat, Stephen Crane

 49

PASSAGE 12:

Heritage, Dorothea McKellar

 54

Part 6: Analysis of further passages from IB SL papers (minus passages)

 57

PASSAGE 13: from The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver  57

The Geranium, Theodore Roethke

 63

from Gorilla My Love, Toni Cade Bambara

 65

Part 7: How to Make Notes (more suggestions)

 69

PASSAGE 14:

from Free Fall, William Golding

 69

PASSAGE 15:

from Adam Bede, George Eliot

 70

Part 8: Writing Your Commentary

 71

PASSAGE 16:

from The Getting of Wisdom, H H Richardson

 74

Section Two: Higher Level Passages

 77

PASSAGE 3:

from The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

 77

PASSAGE 17:

My Father, James Berry

 81

PASSAGE 18:

from The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

 83

PASSAGE 19:

from A Death in the Family, James Agee

 84

PASSAGE 20:

Entirely, Louis MacNeice

 86

Section Three: Passages for Further Practice (not from past IB papers)         

 88

PASSAGE 21:

Hats from Except By Nature, Sandra Alcosser 

 89

PASSAGE 22: The Tourist from Syracuse, Donald Justice  90
PASSAGE 23: The Voice, Thomas Hardy  91

PASSAGE 24:

from The War in Eastern Europe, John Reed

 91

PASSAGE 25:

Adolescence - II, Rita Dove

 92

PASSAGE 26 from The Feast of Stephen, Anthony Hecht  93

PASSAGE 27:

from The Singapore Grip, J G Farrell

 93

PASSAGE 28:

Gamecock, James Dickey

 95

PASSAGE 29:

from Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey

 96

Passages for Further Practice: Guiding Questions

 97

Section Four: How to Compare Passages (for those who need to)

 99

PASSAGE A30:

The Bystander, Rosemary Dobson

 99

PASSAGE A31:

Musee des Beaux Arts, W H Auden

100

PASSAGE 32:

Snake, D H Lawrence

102

PASSAGE 33:

The Killer, Judith Wright

104

PASSAGE 34:

from The Catastrophist, Ronan Bennett

105

PASSAGE 8:

The Interrogation, Edwin Muir (repeat)

106

PASSAGE 20:

Entirely, Louis MacNeice (repeat)

107

PASSAGE 35:

Glory Be to God for Dappled Things, G M Hopkins

108

Section Five: Passages from More Recent Examination Papers 109  
  PASSAGE The Idea of Perfection, Kate Grenville 111  
  PASSAGE Otherwise, Cilla McQueen 112  
  PASSAGE from John Dollar, Marianne Wiggins 113  
  PASSAGE Parachute, Lenrie Peters 113  
  PASSAGE from Bad Blood, Lorna Sage 114  
  PASSAGE Two Hands, Jon Stallworthy 115  
  PASSAGE from The Book of Saladin, Tariq Ali 116  
  PASSAGE Summer Solstice, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, Marilyn Krysl 117  
  PASSAGE from The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L Sayers 117  
  PASSAGE Child and Insect, Robert Druce 118  
  PASSAGE from Back, Henry Green 119  
  PASSAGE Night Wind, Christopher Dewdney 120  
  PASSAGE from The Last Puritan, George Santayana 121  
  PASSAGE Wild Bees, James K Baxter 122  
  PASSAGE from The Life of Pi, Yann Martel 123  
  PASSAGE Planting a Sequoia, Dana Gioia 125  
  PASSAGE from Postcards, E Annie Proulx 126  
  PASSAGE Brainstorm, Howard Nemerov 127  
  PASSAGE from The Loom 128  
  PASSAGE The Wasps' Nest, James L Rosenberg 129  
  Guiding Questions for Section Five Passages 129  
Section Six: Practice (Mock) Examinations) 133  
  PASSAGE The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx 135  
  PASSAGE Twice Shy, Seamus Heaney 137  
  PASSAGE The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath 143  
  PASSAGE The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Randall Jarrell 144  
Section Seven: Advanced Placement Essay Questions 153  
Section Eight: Extremely Short Passages for Extremely Quick Practice 158  
Appendix 1: An Extract Back in Context 168  
  The Feast of Stephen, Anthony Hecht 168  

Final Words

170

Acknowledgements and Copyright Details

171

List of passages used in past IB exam papers, with date of use 173

 

Writing Unseen Commentaries

       Introductory Passages

Things People Do In Front Of Other People

Think of any human activity which involves an audience or spectators – say a soccer match. If we wanted to analyse the match (break it down into its parts) we could do so in different ways, depending on whether we were writing a newspaper report about it, trying to decide whether it had been worth watching, working out why one side rather than the other had won, using it as an illustration of what a ‘good’ game of soccer is, and so on. 

Here’s one way of breaking such an activity down so that we can think about it in an organised way. 

o         Where and when did it take place? (Was the pitch in good shape? What was the weather like?  Did the venue favour one side? What had been written in the sporting press before the match?) We could call that the Setting for the event. 

o         Who took part? (The players, and the referee…and the spectators too if their behaviour had an impact on what was happening on the pitch.) They are the people – Characters – involved. 

o         What happened? (The story of the game, with as much detail as needed.) That’s the Action. 

o         How did it all happen? (An overview of the way the game was played by each team.) We might call that the Style of what went on. 

o         What conclusions can we draw from all of the above? (Can we now explain why the winners won? What did we learn from the match about what makes a winning side, or a good game?) These are the Ideas we take away with us at the end. 

Sorry if you aren’t at all interested in soccer. Try substituting a rock concert, a political meeting, a school assembly, an English lesson, a bank robbery, a family argument… 

Then try a novel or a play. That will take us closer to where we’re going next – a short discussion about how we can analyse literature. We can then set about exploring ways of doing so effectively, particularly when the literature is chopped up into the small bits called ‘Passages for Commentary’.

Novels and Plays – and Poems As Well 

It’s easy to see that novels and plays can be analysed under the same headings. They tell stories after all, and stories involve action which has to happen somewhere and usually includes people…and stories make us think.  

What about Style, however? You maybe felt that category that didn’t work too well for soccer etc. Well it works rather better for literature, since most stories are told in words; and language has a whole range of identifiable styles. (There are other kinds of style, though – playing style, teaching style, criminal style – and when you’re studying plays you’ll come across the phrase ‘dramatic style’, which refers to what makes a particular play distinctive as a piece of theatre.) 

But poetry? Do all five headings work there? 

Narrative poetry presents no problem, since it tells stories (with characters, action and so on). How about ‘ordinary’ poems like most of those you’ve studied so far in school? The answer will vary from poem to poem.

The framework we’ve outlined above can be very useful  when you come to write about a poem or a prose extract, or a short passage from a play. (It can also be very helpful when you’re studying a whole work, particularly when you’re preparing it for an exam…and it’s an excellent way of organising your notes.) 

So see (without looking back) if you can remember the five headings. Think about the football match…or the family argument. Here’s a start:  

Se…

Ch… 

There you are – you’ve already got a valuable tool at your disposal. Now you need to practise using it. 

How You Can Do That 

We’ll look at some pieces of writing, both prose and poetry, to see what part is played in them by each of the five elements we’ve identified (SCASI may help you remember them, if you had trouble doing so a moment ago).  

Section One contains five pairs of extracts – one prose passage and one poem in each case. Most are from past IB Standard Level exam papers. The discussion on the passages in each pair focuses on one of the five SCASI elements. Other features of each passage are noted as well, so that by the time you’ve worked through the first pair, for instance, you will have a much clearer idea of how Setting can help a writer achieve his purpose, in both prose and poetry, but you’ll also have had some practice in picking out examples of the other four elements. 

Section One be enough for you to begin with, if you’re short of time because the exams are close, or English isn’t one of your ‘strong’ subjects, or you’re studying it at IB Standard Level rather than Higher Level. So you may feel ready to go straight to the independent practice passages (Section Three) – which have not been used in IB exams before. 

If however you want to take things further you can work through Section Two (IB Higher Level passages). If you’re an A Level or Advanced Placement student you should certainly try those as well. 

What’s the difference between IB Standard Level and Higher Level commentary questions? Not a great deal. Higher Level passages tend to be longer and more complex (so candidates are allowed more time to write about them); and you’ll often have to do some hard thinking to establish just what’s going on in each case; and they don’t have guiding questions; and Higher Level candidates are expected to pay more attention to that difficult thing Style. But they’re generally unusual pieces of writing and you should find working with them interesting as well as challenging. 

If you’re studying A Level or following an Advanced Placement course, don’t feel you’re sitting in the back row. The IB passages here are very similar to those you’ll meet in your own examination, and the skills you’ll need to analyse them are just the same. The passages in Section Three (Passages for Further Practice) come from other sources, and you’ll have help relating them to your own exam. 

To Get Us Started – a General Example 

Let’s begin by taking one passage and examining briefly how each of its five aspects (Setting, Character, Action…can you add the other two?) is reflected in its detail.                        

First Step: read the passage. It's part of an adventure story. If you don’t feel you’ve understood all the important parts, read it again (it’s quite normal to have to do that). 

 

PASSAGE A

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

 

 

10

 

 

 

 

15

 

 

 

 

20

 

 

 

 

25

 

 

 

 

30

 

 

 

 

35

 

 

 

 

40

 

 

 

 

 

‘Foreigners are not very popular here,’ Mr Butler told me at breakfast. ‘So I don’t think you ought to go out alone.’

  My heart sank. I hated to be dependent on other people. They would never want to do what I wanted to do. I began to feel imprisoned. I took up the moth-eaten balls and the old tennis racket which were lying in the hall, and went into the garden.

  I hit the balls fiercely against the stable doors until I was too hot and unhappy to go on. I sat brooding on the steps. I might have been in Sydenham  for all I could see – a European villa and a line of poplars; yet outside lay a Chinese city which I was longing to explore.

  After lunch I decided that I could stand it no longer. Mr Butler and Mr Roote were still deep in their morning’s discussion, so I let myself quickly out of the back gate and walked along the sandy lane which led into the country. Mr Butler could not mind my walking in the country, I thought.

  Everything was still and silent, in an early-afternoon torpor. The only sound came from the stunted bushes which squeaked and grated linguistically as the wind passed through them. Pillars and scarves of dust and sand rose up from the ground, eddying and swirling themselves into flat sheets which hovered in the air. Harsh spears of grass stuck up through the sand. The soles of my shoes began to burn and I looked round vainly for some shady place. I enjoyed the dreamlike stillness and wanted to stay out for as long as possible. I thought that if I walked on I might find a place. The road led towards the hills. Across the sandy plain the city walls stood up like cliffs. Turrets and bastions were ruined cottages, crumbling into the sea.

  I walked on, fixing my eyes on a black speck some way in front of me. I wondered if it could be a cat crouching in the middle of the road; or perhaps it was a dark boulder.

  As I drew nearer, a haze of flies suddenly lifted, and I saw that the object was not black but pink. The loathsome flies hovered angrily above it, buzzing like dynamos. I bent my head down to see what it was. I stared at it stupidly until my numbed senses suddenly awoke again. Then I jumped back, my throat quite dry and my stomach churning.

  The thing was a human head. The nose and eyes had been eaten away and the black hair was caked and grey with dust. Odd white teeth stood up like ninepins in its dark, gaping mouth. Its cheeks and shrivelled lips were plastered black with dried blood, and I saw long coarse hairs growing out of its ears.

  Because it was so terrible, my eyes had to return to it whenever I looked away. I stared into its raw eye-sockets until waves of sickness spread over me. Then I ran. The whole plain and the bare hills had suddenly become tinged with horror.

  I found myself between high banks. I would soon be coming to a village. There were signs of cultivation. When the first cur barked, I turned and ran back the way I had come. I did not know what to do. I would have to pass the head again.

  I tried to avoid it by making for the city walls across the pathless sand. My feet sank in, and my shoes became full and heavy. My only idea was to get back to the house.

  Tall rank grass grew in the shadow of the wall. It was dry and sharp as knives. I pushed through it, looking up at the towering cliff for a gate or steps to climb. Nothing else seemed to be alive except the insects. I could only hear their buzzing and the slap of them when they hit the wall.

  There was no gate. I began to feel desperate. I ran towards a bastion, wondering if I could climb up to it in any way. I knew that I could not.

                                                                       

                                                            Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage (1943)

Second Step: Make brief notes in response to the following questions. After each set of questions you can look at the boxed section to see how you’re doing. Don’t be concerned if you seem at times to have got it all wrong. 

1. Setting 

a)         4-5  What does the condition of the tennis balls and the tennis racquet tell us about the place the boy is staying in? 

b)        8  Poplar trees are tall and thin and are usually planted in straight lines. How does that make them an appropriate choice (by the writer) as part of the scenery? (Sydenham is a London suburb.) 

c)         38 What is there about the grass as described in these lines which adds to the boy’s fear? Can you see a connection with line 17? 

d)         39-40 What effect on the atmosphere of the passage does this second mention of insects have? 

a) Young people used to stay here, but haven't for some time: the house is no longer set up for a young (and adventurous) visitor.

b) They represent the regimentation and European orderliness that the boy wants to escape from.

c) The grass is ‘tall’ (maybe difficult to see over, and someone could be hiding in it) and ‘rank’  (which can                   mean both wild and evil-smelling); it is growing in the ‘shadow’ of the wall (and therefore darker than the                 sunlit countryside around); and the fact that it is ‘sharp as knives’ makes it seem dangerous. It resists him, so that he has to push through it. The connection with line 17  is in the phrase ‘harsh spears of grass’ in that line.

d)  It reminds us of the severed head, around which flies were also buzzing; it might suggest that the flies have pursued him here; and the fact that the insects are banging into the wall as if they want to get through it emphasises the fact that he too is trapped outside the city. 

 2. Character 

a)         3-4  ‘I hated to be dependent on other people. They would never want to do what I wanted to do.’  Which of these two sentences reveals more about the boy’s character? 

b)         6-8  Which two words in this paragraph might lead us to describe the boy as spoilt? 

c)         9-11 In the last sentence of this paragraph the boy tries to persuade himself that he is not doing anything wrong. Which word earlier in the paragraph shows that he does in fact know that he should not be going off by himself? 

 a) The second. The first one tells us how he likes to be thought of (as independent); the second one reveals that he really just prefers to get his own way.

b) ‘fiercely’ and  ‘brooding’. You could also argue that the phrase ‘for all I could see’ is sarcastic.

c)  ‘quickly’ 

 3. Action  

a)         What elements of conflict – things likely to force a development in the situation – are present in the opening four paragraphs (lines 1-13)? 

b)         20-24 How does the writer build up suspense for the reader? 

 a) The boy is in an alien environment ‘here’, in China; but the ‘European villa’ itself is unwelcoming; Mr           Butler’s attitude is restrictive; the boy is rebellious by nature; and in any case he badly wants to explore the area. Something’s got to give!

b) It takes the boy some time to reach the ‘black speck’ in the road. As he walks he speculates as to what it might be. The ‘haze’ of flies suggests that it may be something decaying. The flies rise and are now described as ‘loathsome’, and that word taken together with the pinkness of the object just revealed suggest that something horrible is lying there. Then in lines 23 and 24 the writer describes the boy’s physical reaction, but he makes us wait until the next paragraph before telling us what it is that the boy has seen. The timing of all of that is carefully controlled. 

 4. Style 

a)         12-15 What details in the writer’s description of the landscape suggest that it has a life of its own, and that it is rather threatening? 

b)         32 The phrase ‘tinged with horror’ suggests that in the boy’s eyes even the ……. of the scenery has changed.  

c)         30-32  What is there about these sentences which emphasises the boy’s panic?

 a) The landscape is in a state of ‘torpor’ (as if it feels sleepy); the bushes emit sounds like harsh human speech (they ‘squeaked and grated linguistically’); the dust and sand behave as if they can control their movements (‘eddying and swirling themselves into flat sheets’); and the grass is like ‘spears’ which ‘stuck up through the sand’ (also as if they were doing it of their own volition, as an act of aggression).

b) Colour

c) They’re short, indicating the speed at which things are happening.

5. Ideas 

Which of the following ideas underlie this piece of narrative?

·          Adolescent rebelliousness

·          Rationalisation (finding ‘reasons’ to support questionable behaviour)

·          The gap between cultures

·          The unexpectedness of things

 All of them. We should possibly call them themes rather than ideas. (We’ll talk later about the difference between the two.)

If some of the details we’ve picked out under each of the headings have struck you as obvious – good! When you’re writing a commentary you must be prepared to mention the straightforward things (straightforwardly) as well as the more subtle ones. Don’t try to be clever until you’ve been sound.

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