Twenty-Six Answers on 'The Eyes Have It': Retelling versus Analysis
Twenty-six candidates answer a 5-mark literature question: 'How does Ruskin Bond make the narrator's blindness a source of both comedy and pathos in "The Eyes Have It"?' Twenty of them write a summary of the train journey, the girl, the co-passenger and the final revelation. Three write only 'the narrator was blind and the girl was also blind, so it was ironic'. One candidate, Farhan, writes: 'The comedy comes from the narrator's confidence. He talks about the view as though he can see it and never admits otherwise, and the girl, who is also blind, answers him seriously, so two people build a view of the world neither can see. The pathos is that neither can be honest. The final revelation that she was blind too turns the joke on the reader, because we have been enjoying a performance we did not understand.' The mark scheme rewards 'understanding of irony and the writer's technique'.
1. Award Farhan's answer and the twenty summaries. What does the award tell you about the difference between retelling and analysis?
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Farhan: 5. The twenty summaries: 1-2.
The question asks how Bond makes blindness a source of comedy and pathos. It is a question about technique and effect, with three components: the device, the double response (laughter plus pity), and the ending that re-reads everything before it.
Farhan does all three:
- Device located, not just labelled: the narrator's confidence answered by the girl's seriousness - two people 'building a view of the world neither can see'. That is dramatic irony described in the student's own terms.
- Comedy explained: the humour lies in the fluency of the pretence and in the reader being placed inside it, not in blindness itself.
- Pathos explained and linked: 'neither can be honest' is the cost of the performance, so comedy and pathos spring from the same source.
- Ending used as a turning point: the revelation 'turns the joke on the reader', which is exactly how the story's last lines work.
The twenty summaries contain true content but answer no part of 'how'. They name characters and events; they select no device and state no effect. On a 5-mark scale that is 1-2: credit for knowing the story, no credit for analysis. The three who write only 'so it was ironic' name the effect but not its construction, so they sit at 2, not 5.
The lesson: a literature answer must point to a specific moment, name what the writer is doing, and state what it does to the reader. Retelling is raw material, not an answer.
2. Write two follow-up questions for the twenty candidates, one of which can be answered only by a student who has understood the ending. Explain why each works.
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Question 1 (accessible only to a student who has understood the ending): 'At which point does the reader come to know more than the narrator, and how does that knowledge change the way we read his earlier remarks about the view and about the girl?'
Why it works: plot recall cannot answer it, because the plot does not state when the reader learns. The student must locate the shift (the co-passenger's revelation) and then re-read the earlier conversation in its light. A student who has not understood the ending says 'at the end' and stops; a student who has will describe the narrator's confident talk becoming comic and then painful. It converts a fact into a reading.
Question 2 (hypothetical, testing the logic of the irony): 'If the girl had known from the start that the narrator was blind, would the story still be funny? Would it still be sad? Give reasons from the text.'
Why it works: it isolates the mechanism. The irony depends on mutual ignorance; remove it and the comedy collapses into embarrassment while the pathos changes character. The student must defend a counterfactual with textual evidence - the move weak answers avoid, and the one the top band rewards.
Design notes: both questions are short, both can be answered in four or five sentences, and neither can be answered by reproducing a summary. Question 1 repairs the specific weakness of the twenty; Question 2 stretches Farhan, who already has the mechanism and can now test it.