Prescribed Prose: Character, Narrative Technique and Critical Judgement
Questions on your prescribed prose pieces ask you to explain what a text does and how it does it: a character's function, the significance of an incident, the title, the narrative voice, or a critical judgement. The WBCHSE English B prose set includes, among others, Ruskin Bond's 'The Eyes Have It', A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's 'Strong Roots' and Tolstoy's parabolic stories.
What to prepare per text
- Narrative voice: first-person irony in Bond; autobiographical recollection in Kalam, where the speaker's adult judgement colours childhood memory.
- Structure: where the turning point falls and what it changes.
- Character function: what a minor figure exists to reveal.
- Theme stated as a claim, not a topic: not 'blindness' but 'blindness exposes how much of love is performance'.
- Two or three short quotations you can deploy accurately.
Worked example
Question: How does the ending of 'The Eyes Have It' create irony? Reasoning: the narrator hides his blindness, constructs a courtship on a train, and is pleased with his own performance; a new passenger then reveals that the girl is completely blind. The reader's assumptions and the narrator's self-image collapse together. Answer structure: (1) name the irony - situational and dramatic; (2) cite the evidence - the concealment, the flirtation, the final disclosure; (3) state the effect - the narrator's cleverness becomes absurd, and the story quietly questions whether anyone truly perceives another person.
Traps
- Retelling the plot instead of answering.
- Ignoring the focus word: 'irony', 'contrast', 'significance of the title'.
- Unsupported judgement: 'It is a very touching story' earns nothing.
- Confusing narrator with author.
- Quoting inaccurately; a misquoted line undercuts an otherwise good answer.