Commentary on prescribed literary works
The PAU fixes a short list of compulsory readings for each convocatòria - verify the current list in the official resolution - and the commentary question asks you to analyse a fragment from one of them. The grid below works for any of them; what changes is the content, not the method.
The grid
- Fitxa: title, author, date, genre, movement.
- Localisation: where the fragment sits in the work and what it does in the plot or argument.
- Structure: the internal parts of the passage and the turn between them.
- Veus: narrator or poetic voice, person, focalisation, degree of knowledge, reliability.
- Personatges: function and evolution, flat versus round.
- Temps i espai: chronology, analepsi and prolepsi, symbolic space.
- Temes: two or three, each tied to a textual marker.
- Estil: lexis, syntax, images, register, dialogue.
- Contextualització i valoració: the work's place in its period and a judgement supported by the text.
Worked example (invented fragment)
El dia que vaig arribar a la ciutat, plovia. Vaig comptar els balcons com qui compta els dies que li queden.
A weak answer says és una novel·la i parla de la ciutat. A strong one proceeds by markers: first-person narration with internal focalisation (vaig arribar, vaig comptar), retrospective narration implied by the temporal frame, rain as an inaugural motif, and a comparison that turns counting into an image of confinement. Structure: two sentences, the second reinterpreting the first. Theme: displacement and uprooting. Style: short paratactic sentences, no adjectives, affective restraint. The reasoning is that every claim is tied to a word in the fragment; a commentary without quotation is an opinion.
Traps
Retelling the plot instead of analysing it; describing the whole work when the question asks about a fragment; listing figures without explaining their effect; ignoring the narrator when the fragment is first-person; giving a personal judgement unsupported by any textual evidence.