Fiction Exam Suggested Answers

Extract from Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd

Part I: 2 points for each definition: 1 for lge/ 1 for content.

Situational Irony: it is irony in which the difference is between what we might expect or what seems appropriate, and what actually happens.

Unreliable Narrator: he is the central character who tells his own story. He may be deceptive, self-deceptive, or mentally disturbed, and, as such, may distort facts and events to defend his side of the story.

Consonance: the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the end of stressed syllables, but with different vowel sounds, within or at the end of a line.

Part II: 14 points:

1. 7 points (3 for lge/ 4 for content)

In this extract, Hardy deploys situational irony in order to account for his major character’s peculiar conduct and awkward manners. The first instance of situational irony can be detected in the description of Farmer Oak’s behaviour when attending the Sunday sermon in the church. Rather given to neutrality, Farmer Oak “yawned privately and thought of what there would be for dinner when he was meant to be listening to the sermon,” details that uncover his boredom, indifference, and lack of religious fervour and motivation.

The second irony of situation rather concerns a physical detail, namely Oak’s small silver clock/watch. Not only is this watch a strange device “as to shape and intention,” but it is also unexpectedly defective and imprecise as to function and efficiency. Its inclination to “go either too fast or not at all,” and its hands’ inability to strike the exact hour ironically reveal its uselessness. The absurdity of the situation is heightened by the depiction of Oak’s helpless efforts to remedy for the intermittencies of his clock through observing “the sun and stars” and peeping through “his neighbours’ windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced timekeepers within.” The author ultimately underscores the cumbersomeness of this process through depicting Oak’s struggle to draw up the watch from his pocket “by its chain, like a bucket from a well,” a simile that further points out Oak’s clumsy movements as well as his comic character.

2. 3 points (1 for lge/ 2 for content)

This text is mediated by an omniscient narrator, whose external perspective is predominantly objective and neutral. This all-knowing narrator draws a realistic image of the main character as well as his surroundings and the characters with whom he interacts. In order to reinforce the verisimilitude of his account, the narrator gives the reader access not only to his main character’s physical portrait, but also to his innermost feelings and impressions. In fact, through making his character open to public scrutiny, the omniscient

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narrator allows the reader to know more about the character than the latter probably knows about himself, while also flaunting his unlimited authority over the fictional universe he creates in his text.

3. 4 points (2 for lge/ 2 for content)

The tone of this text is plainly humorous and light-hearted (even playful). This can be revealed through the funny image drawn by the narrator for his character. The repetition of the word “peculiar” (and the use of similes) to describe Oak’s physical appearance and awkward manners also reinforces the comic aspect of the text. Yet, in the fourth and fifth paragraphs, the author rather adopts a serious and reverent attitude which belies any contemptuous inclination towards his character. The choice of lofty and appreciative diction: “responsible, quiet, modesty, impress, unassumingly, brightest period, masculine growth, intellect,” certainly points out Oak’s growth into adulthood and maturity, his rationality, and above all, his impressively “quiet modesty.” Such qualities, the author insinuates, are much more valuable than physical appearance, which explains the shift to a solemn and formal tone.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”

In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), Edgar Allan Poe provides a thorough psychological analysis of a sociopathic1 character with a criminal disposition. Throughout the narrative, Poe’s unreliable narrator feigns sanity only to ironically betray his madness and mental disturbance. This discrepancy between what the character states about himself and what is actually implied results in a doubleness of meaning that pervades the whole text. In the first paragraph, the narrator’s assertion that “the disease” had “sharpened” his senses and his appreciative description of his “healthy” condition and his rationality are ironically countered by the contents of his story. His decision to kill the “old man” because of his “Evil Eye” evinces his unnatural and imbalanced mental condition while also introducing an important symbol within the narrative thread. The symbol of the Evil Eye is based on a widespread belief that some people can harm others physically or mentally with their vicious look. As such, this symbol works as a trigger for the main action which is the murder of the old man. That the old man’s eye “vexe[s]” him and makes him feel “very, very dreadfully nervous” is a valid reason for the narrator to “rid” himself of the old man’s evil gaze “forever.”

In the third paragraph, verbal irony is reinforced by the narrator’s statement: “You fancy me mad” whereby he anticipates the readers’ doubts concerning his sanity and tries to prove his alertness. This ironic situation is confirmed when his boasting with his foresight, caution, and wisdom, and his rhetorical question “Ha!—would a madman have been so wise as this?” are thwarted by his irrational thoughts about the old man. Indeed, personifying the old man’s eye by projecting upon it his irritation and frustration ultimately evince the narrator’s homicidal disposition. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the narrator’s manic

1 A sociopath is person whose behaviour is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

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reaction to the old man’s vulture eye elicits Jacques Lacan’s politics of the gaze. In Lacanian terms, anxiety is transformed into an experience of being externally scrutinized. It is translated in an anonymous look (real or imaginary) from elsewhere by an invisible other before whom a person is reduced to anxiety and shame. In Poe’s story, the narrator not only seems troubled by the fact of being scrutinised by a gaze which is both present and absent (for he is troubled by the old man’s evil eye even when the latter is asleep), but he is also reduced to extreme anxiety and anticipates being charged with envy, revenge, or covetousness. Such feelings explain his self-defensive claims and confessions: “He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire.” Juxtaposed with the sentence “my blood ran cold,” however, such claims ironically further incriminate the narrator and substantiate his attempt to manipulate the reader and arouse his sympathy.

A second symbol connected with the politics of the gaze and deployed by the author is the beating of the old man’s heart. In the first part of the story, the old man’s heartbeat produces a rhythm that reinforces the narrator’s anxiety, heightens the narrative’s suspense, and presages the old man’s tragic destiny. In this respect, the expressions “the old man’s hour had come,” and “the dead hour of the night” and the simile “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton […] as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage” establish the old man’s heartbeat as the major leitmotif that builds up the climax of the story and culminates in the story’s major event, namely the act of murder.

In the second part of the story, however, this contextual symbol is omnipresent but acquires another dimension. In fact, the same “low, dull, quick sound” which resembles the sound “a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” continues to haunt the narrator’s troubled consciousness, thereby reinforcing the panoptical effect of the old man’s eye after his death. This sense transference, whereby the old man’s sight is supplanted by his death-defying heartthrob, also heightens the narrator’s anxiety and further evinces his paranoid attitude. With his guilty conscience tormenting him, and through a confrontation with a third gaze – the officers’ - whose panoptical presence and authority equally increases his panic and blurs his troubled vision, the narrator ultimately capitulates to his hallucinations.

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