'Discuss the view': judging a character when the question invites a verdict
The essay question reads: 'In the novel you have studied, a mother leaves her two children with her sister and travels abroad for work. Discuss the view that her decision is selfish.' You have three episodes you could use. In the first, before leaving, she counts money at the kitchen table at two in the morning and rewrites the same list three times. In the second, at the airport, the narrative follows her hand rather than her face as she hands her sister the children's passports and then a boarding pass. In the third, seven years later, she returns and the narrator describes her shoes, her accent and the way she stands in the doorway. You have forty minutes. Your instinct is to defend her strongly, because you like her.
1. How should you handle the word 'selfish' in the question, and what does an examiner reward when a question invites a value judgement?
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Treat 'selfish' as the proposition under test, not as a fact and not as an insult to be rebutted. Three moves:
- Define it in usable terms. Selfishness means weighing your own interest above others' and acting on that weighting. That definition immediately generates the questions the essay must answer: whose interests are at stake, by what standard are they weighed, and does the novel give us access to her weighing?
- Test the proposition against method, not against your sympathies. The kitchen-table episode shows the writer granting us her deliberation, which weakens the charge. The airport passage withholds her face and shows only the handover of documents, which withholds the evidence the charge would need - and that withholding is itself an interpretative point, not a gap in your essay.
- Distinguish character from author. The novel need neither endorse nor condemn her; asking what the writing makes available to the reader is stronger than asserting what the book 'is saying'.
Examiners reward a line taken and defended, awareness of the opposing reading, evidence from technique, and a verdict arrived at rather than assumed. They penalise moralising paragraphs with no textual evidence, agreeing with the question because it is there, and letting personal liking of the character stand in for argument - which is precisely the risk in your instinct to defend her.
2. You can use only two of the three episodes. Which two do you choose, and how do you justify leaving one out?
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I would use the kitchen table and the airport, and leave out the return, though with a qualification.
Justification by relevance: the question is about the decision, and the decision has two analysable parts - motive and act. The kitchen table answers motive: money counted at two in the morning, a list rewritten three times, is a picture of a person weighing costs, and the rewriting is the writer's way of making deliberation visible. That directly contests 'selfish', which presupposes that the choice was easy or single-minded. The airport answers the act: the camera stays on the hand and withholds the face, so the reader is denied the emotional display that would settle the question either way. Together they let me argue that the writer constructs the judgement rather than delivering it.
Why leave out the return: it belongs to a different question - consequences, not the decision - and seven years later the woman described through shoes, accent and doorway is also a stranger in a new country, which would pull the essay toward whether she was right rather than whether the choice was selfish. I would add a qualification: if the question were about the effects of her decision, the return would be essential, and I could give it one closing sentence to show the consequences are not sentimentalised.
3. Write the concluding paragraph, making sure it evaluates rather than repeats.
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'The novel neither convicts nor acquits her, and the terms of the question turn out to be too blunt for what the writing does. Selfishness requires a settled weighing of interests, and the narrative refuses to settle: it gives us the repeated list at two in the morning, where a choice is visibly costly, and then, at the airport, it looks only at a hand exchanging documents, denying us the face that would tell us what the choice cost her. What the reader is left with is not a verdict but a judgement under construction. If the decision is selfish, it is selfish in the way most real decisions are - made by someone who is counting, and made without a clear view of the moment it becomes irreversible. The strength of the episode lies in that discomfort rather than in any moral the novel might be said to teach.'
This paragraph evaluates because it reopens the question's key term, uses the two chosen episodes as evidence about how the writer manages our access to motive, and reaches a qualified position rather than restating the introduction. It also avoids the two common failures: a summary of earlier points, and a moral verdict the text does not license.