Prescribed Prose: Irony and the Narrator's Mask
In your prescribed prose text, the narrator reports a speech by a character who claims to have acted for the city's good, and then adds a single evaluative clause of his own. Your essay question asks how the narrator guides the reader's judgment of that character. You have a quotation in which the character's claim is followed by the narrator's comment ὅπερ οὐκ ἐποίησεν, 'which he did not do'. A classmate argues the narrator is neutral because he reports rather than denounces. You must decide how to use the quotation and one other piece of evidence from the set text.
1. How would you argue against the 'neutral narrator' reading using the clause ὅπερ οὐκ ἐποίησεν?
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The clause is not neutral reporting; it is a compact refutation placed immediately after the character's claim. The relative ὅπερ points back to a specific promise or claim, and the negated aorist ἐποίησεν flatly denies that it was carried out. The narrator does not need to denounce the character because the juxtaposition does the work: the reader hears the claim and, in the same breath, its contradiction. This is a form of irony achieved by structure rather than comment. A neutral reporter would leave the discrepancy for the reader to infer or would report a counter-claim; this narrator supplies the verdict himself. The brevity is itself rhetorical, since a short flat denial is harder to argue with than an elaborate denunciation, and it invites the reader to supply the moral judgment the narrator has implied.
2. What second piece of evidence would strengthen the argument, and how would you integrate it without merely listing quotations?
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A strong second piece would be a passage where the narrator's ordering of events makes the character look worse than the character's own account allows, for example by placing a detail of suffering immediately after the character's profession of concern. I would integrate it by showing that the two passages work the same way: claim first, deflating detail second. The pattern, not the individual quotation, is the argument. I would avoid a list of quotations by framing each as a test of the neutral hypothesis: if the narrator were neutral, we would expect the claims to stand unchallenged or to be balanced by counter-claims; instead, in both passages the narrator's own words close the question. I would also concede the limits of the evidence, noting that one or two instances establish a tendency rather than a rule, and that the narrator may be more even-handed elsewhere in the text.