IB English A Lit Interpret Any English Lit Text Notes

Good Commentary Means Ripping Texts Apart

1. The best IB English Lit students don't just read a text and say what it's about. They rip it apart, piece by piece, and show how each piece works.
2. Think of literary analysis as reverse engineering. The author built something deliberate. Your job is to figure out how and why they built it that way.
3. Every word, sentence, and structural choice is a building block. Good commentary shows what each block does and how it fits together.
4. This chapter walks you through a step-by-step method you can apply to any literary text, whether it's prose, poetry, or drama.
5. Let's work with this example:

1. This is the opening passage of one of the most studied novels in English literature. Every sentence is doing multiple things at once.
2. We'll use this passage to practise a method that works for any literary extract you encounter in the IB exam.

Start Literal

1. Before you do anything clever, make sure you understand the text on a basic, surface level. Ask yourself four questions:
   1. Who is speaking? A first-person narrator ("I", "my") is telling us about his father's advice.
   2. What is happening? The narrator is recalling a piece of advice his father gave him when he was young.
   3. When and where? We don't know yet. The narrator is looking back from some unspecified point in the future.
   4. Anything strange or unexpected? Yes. A novel that opens not with action or setting, but with someone else's advice. The narrator also describes himself as a "victim" of bores.

Break It Into Sections

1. Don't try to analyse the whole passage at once. Divide it into chunks based on where the focus or idea shifts.
2. For the Gatsby passage, three natural sections emerge:
   1. Section 1 - The father's advice: "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice..." through to "...the advantages that you've had."
   2. Section 2 - The narrator's response: "He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved sort of way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that."
   3. Section 3 - The consequences: "In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores."