IB English A Lit Prose Fiction Questionbank

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Ledger of Names by Rosa Whitcombe. In a library, Ada, a librarian of fifty years, greets a man who has returned decades after his boyhood visits and looks up his old membership record.

The Ledger of Names

The man came in out of the rain the way everyone did, apologising to the door.

Ada did not look up at once. She had learned, over fifty years behind the desk, that a person needs a moment to become a reader again, to shed the street. She let the stamp fall twice on the returns before she raised her eyes.

"You've kept it," he said. He was looking at the long oak counter, at the brass lamp, at the card index that still breathed its faint smell of pencil and dust.

"Things that work do not need replacing," Ada said. "Membership?"

"You won't have me. It was a long time ago."

She turned the ledger toward the light without hurry. Her hands were spotted now, but they moved the way they always had, sure as swallows. "We do not throw the old books out," she said. "Name."

He told her. She turned back through the years, page over page, decade over decade, until the paper grew softer under her thumb, and there it was, a boy's careful signature, the letters too big, the date some forty summers gone.

"You sat at the third table," she said. "You read the atlases and never the novels. You were saving the world for later."

He laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle, and she understood that later had arrived for him, that he had come back the way people come back, to see whether a small fixed thing had held its place while they had gone soft and grey and far.

"You haven't changed," he said, which was a kindness and a lie.

"I have changed entirely," Ada said. "I have simply done it here, where you could not watch. That is the trick of it. You go away and come back and are amazed, and I stayed and was amazed more slowly."

She stamped a new card and slid it across the oak. The old boy's name, the old careful hand, and beneath it the same name in the tremor of a man who had spent his allotment of years elsewhere.

"Third table is free," she said. "It usually is, this hour."

He went and sat, and the rain went on against the high windows, and Ada returned to her stamping, two beats, a pause, two beats, the metronome of a life kept in one room while outside the whole century had turned over in its sleep.

She did not think it sad. She thought it was simply the shape a life could take, if you were willing to be the thing that stayed.

Text 2 is an excerpt from the memoir A Later Hand by Iris Ballantyne. On the morning of a birthday, the narrator reflects on a lifelong habit of writing a letter to the self each year, then reading and burning the one from the year before.

A Later Hand

For forty years I have written myself a letter on the morning of my birthday, and read the one from the year before, and then burned it in the sink. I do not keep them. That is the whole point of them. A diary hoards; my letters are built to be lost, the way a year is built to be lost, so that the only place they survive is in whatever they did to me on the way out.

When I was young the letters were loud. They made promises the way a puppy makes promises, with the whole body, meaning every word and forgetting it by lunch. I was going to be enormous. I was going to be kind and also famous, which I did not then know were two different careers.

Somewhere in my forties the letters went quiet. They stopped predicting and started noticing. I would read the previous year and find not a stranger, exactly, but a younger relative, someone with my nose and less sense, and I would feel toward that person the particular tenderness you feel for anyone who does not yet know what is coming and would not believe you if you told them.

Now my handwriting has changed. It leans. It has the tremor of a bridge that has decided to admit, at last, that it carries weight. I read last year's letter this morning and the man who wrote it seemed, for the first time, roughly my own age. That was the surprise of this birthday: not that I had grown old, but that I had finally caught up with myself, that the gap between the one who writes and the one who is written about had closed to nothing, the way a shadow shortens under a climbing sun until, at noon, you are standing on it.

I burned the letter. The ash curled and lifted and I watched a year go grey and rise off the porcelain, and the old superstition came up in me, the fear that I was destroying evidence. But there is no evidence. There is only the residue, the way the sea leaves salt. I am the salt of every year I have burned. I do not need the letters. I am the letters, folded now into a body that leans, that carries weight, that writes a little slower and means it more.

Then I made the tea and began, in the changed hand, the next one. Dear you. Well. Here we still are.

(a) Text 1: Discuss how the writer uses narrative perspective and voice to shape the reader's understanding of Ada and the passage of years.

(b) Text 2: Discuss how the writer uses voice and figurative language to convey a changing sense of self across the years.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Signalman's Daughter by Doran Whitfield. Mira waits at the unlit end of a station platform at night for Tomas, who arrives carrying the yellow umbrella he has been meaning to return to her.

The Signalman's Daughter

The train would not come for another forty minutes, and Mira had already decided three separate times that she would not wait for it. Each decision lasted about as long as the steam from her breath, which the cold unwound and carried off toward the hills. She stood at the far end of the platform, past the lamp, in the part of the dark the station master never bothered to light, because that was where she and Tomas had always stood, in the years when standing close was the whole of the plan.

He was late. He was always late, and she had once found this charming, the way you find a stray dog charming until it is your own and it has eaten your shoe. Now his lateness felt like a sentence being spoken very slowly, a verdict she already knew and had to hear pronounced anyway.

She had rehearsed what she would say. She had rehearsed it on the bus and in the queue at the ticket window and again while the pigeons resettled in the rafters like an audience getting comfortable. The words were good words. They were fair. They did not blame him for the flat that was too small or the job that had gone or the way a marriage can thin without anyone deciding to thin it, the way a coat wears through at the elbow first because that is where you lean.

Then she saw him at the top of the stairs, and every fair word left her the way birds leave a wire, all at once, for no reason she could name.

He came down slowly. He was carrying, she saw, the yellow umbrella, though it had not rained in a week, and she understood that he had brought it because it was hers, because he had been meaning to return it, and because returning a thing is a way of saying you have thought about the person it belongs to. He held it out before he reached her, as if it were a small flag of a country that no longer existed.

"You kept it," she said.

"I keep things," he said, and the plainness of it undid her more than any argument could have. They stood in the unlit end of the platform, not touching, the umbrella between them like a third person who knew them both too well to leave.

Somewhere down the line a signal changed. The rail began its thin electric hum, the sound of something arriving that could not be argued with.

Text 2 is an excerpt from the memoir A Grammar of Leaving by Salome Ferrant. The narrator recalls being seventeen and loving Piet, a boy who worked the ferries, whom she watched coiling rope at the harbour.

A Grammar of Leaving

I was seventeen the summer I loved Piet, and I want to be honest about the word loved, because at seventeen it is less a feeling than a country you emigrate to overnight, carrying nothing, sure they will speak your language when you arrive.

He worked the ferries. That is almost all I knew of him and almost all I needed. He had a way of coiling rope that I found unreasonably moving, as if the rope were being persuaded rather than forced, and I used to invent errands that took me down to the harbour so that I could watch a boy make loops out of a thing that wanted to be straight.

We spoke, in total, perhaps four times. I have spent more of my life remembering those four conversations than I spent having them, which tells you something about the economy of first love, how little principal it needs to pay out such enormous interest for such a long time.

What I remember is not what he said. I remember the weather of standing near him. I remember deciding, with the terrible seriousness of the young, that my whole life would be arranged around the harbour, and then September came, as Septembers do, indifferent to the arrangements of seventeen year olds, and I went inland to a college in a city that had no water in it that you would want to stand beside.

I did not have my heart broken. That is the part I understand only now. Nothing was broken because nothing had been built; I had loved the way you love a lit window from the street, wholly and from the outside, with no wish to be let in and spoil it. Piet never knew. That was not a tragedy. That was the form the thing required.

Years later someone showed me a photograph of the harbour and there, at the edge, blurred, was a man who might have been him, older, coiling rope still, or perhaps only a stranger doing what men do at harbours. I did not ask. I have kept some things unopened on purpose, the way you keep one letter unread so that a person is never entirely finished saying things to you.

Longing, I have decided, is not a failure of love. It is a grammar. It is the tense we use for what we chose not to have, conjugating a life in the mood of the possible, which is the only mood in which some loves are allowed to go on forever.

(a) Text 1: Analyse how narrative perspective and voice convey Mira's state of mind in this passage.

(b) Text 2: Analyse how voice and figurative language present the speaker's reflection on first love in this passage.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel Sixty Covers by Idris Kalloway. During a hectic restaurant dinner service, the narrator, a line cook, works to fill Chef's orders while helping Teo, a struggling younger cook at the next station.

Sixty Covers

The tickets come faster than I can read them, a white paper river spooling out of the machine, and Chef's voice cuts through the steam like something thrown. "Order in. Two scallop, one duck, fire the halibut." I say "Yes, Chef," though I do not feel my mouth move. My hands are already working, and tonight my hands are smarter than I am.

The scallops hit the pan and scream. That is the sound I love, the sound that means the surface is hot enough to give them a crust instead of a stew. I count in my head, not seconds but heartbeats, because the clock on the wall is a liar and my pulse never is. Flip at four. Baste with the foaming butter, tilt the pan, spoon the gold over the white until the edges turn the color of a good decision.

Beside me, Teo is drowning. I can smell it before I see it, the sharp black note of something left too long. He is nineteen and his station looks like a war he is losing. "Behind," I say, and I reach across without asking and pull his pan off the flame, and he flinches like I have hit him. "Breathe. Reset. You have time you do not think you have."

Chef does not look up. Chef never looks up, but Chef sees everything, the way a spider feels the far edge of the web. "How long on that halibut?"

"Two minutes, Chef."

"You have ninety seconds."

So I have ninety seconds. The math of a kitchen is not real math. It is faith and speed and the willingness to lie a little to the truth until the truth catches up and forgives you.

The plates go up under the heat lamps and for one held breath they are perfect, they are exactly the picture in Chef's head, and then a hand takes them away into the dark of the dining room where I will never see them eaten. That is the strange grief of this work. You make the most beautiful thing you can and then you give it to strangers and start again from nothing.

"Refire," Chef says, and the paper river keeps spooling, and I wipe my hands on the towel at my waist, and I say "Yes, Chef," and I mean it like a vow.

Text 2 is an excerpt from the memoir The Arithmetic of Enough by Nadia Okonkwo. The narrator recalls childhood mornings at the market with her mother, who carefully weighed every purchase against what the family's cloth purse would allow.

The Arithmetic of Enough

When I was a child we did our real arithmetic at the market, and it was the only arithmetic that ever frightened me. My mother carried the week in a cloth purse the color of dried tobacco, and I carried the list, which was less a list than a negotiation between what we wanted and what the purse would allow. The stalls opened like books we could not afford to read too slowly.

I learned early that hunger is not a feeling but a kind of attention. It sharpens you. A hungry child can tell you the exact number of eggs in a bowl from across the road, can weigh a loaf with his eyes, can smell frying onions three streets away and follow the scent like a hound follows a hare. I was fluent in the language of what we did not have.

My mother had a way of touching fruit that I still see when I close my eyes. She would lift an orange as if it were a small planet, turn it, press it with her thumb, and set it down again with a tenderness that was also a refusal. "Not today," she would say, and the orange would go back to its pyramid, and I would understand that "not today" was the chorus of our whole small opera.

But she was not a sad woman, and ours was not a sad house. Scarcity, I have come to think, is a strict teacher but not always a cruel one. It taught us that a single chicken could become three dinners and a soup, that the bones themselves held a second meal like a secret. My mother could stretch a pot the way other women stretched dough, and when the neighbors came, as they always came, there was somehow always a chair and a bowl.

I did not know we were poor until someone told me, and even then the word sat wrong in my mouth, too flat for the richness I remembered. We were not poor. We were careful. There is a dignity in carefulness that the comfortable never learn, a way of holding an apple as though it has a name.

Now my own cupboards are full, and I am grateful, and I am also, in some small chamber of myself, homesick for the hunger. Not for the want of it. For the attention of it. For the market mornings when my mother taught me, orange by orange, that enough is not a quantity. It is a decision you make with your hands.

(a) Text 1: Discuss how the writer uses narrative perspective and voice to convey the pressures of the kitchen during service.

(b) Text 2: Discuss how the writer uses voice and figurative language to present the experience of scarcity.

The following text is an excerpt from the novel The Signalman's Daughter by Doran Whitfield. Mira waits at the unlit end of a station platform at night for Tomas, who arrives carrying the yellow umbrella he has been meaning to return to her.

The Signalman's Daughter

The train would not come for another forty minutes, and Mira had already decided three separate times that she would not wait for it. Each decision lasted about as long as the steam from her breath, which the cold unwound and carried off toward the hills. She stood at the far end of the platform, past the lamp, in the part of the dark the station master never bothered to light, because that was where she and Tomas had always stood, in the years when standing close was the whole of the plan.

He was late. He was always late, and she had once found this charming, the way you find a stray dog charming until it is your own and it has eaten your shoe. Now his lateness felt like a sentence being spoken very slowly, a verdict she already knew and had to hear pronounced anyway.

She had rehearsed what she would say. She had rehearsed it on the bus and in the queue at the ticket window and again while the pigeons resettled in the rafters like an audience getting comfortable. The words were good words. They were fair. They did not blame him for the flat that was too small or the job that had gone or the way a marriage can thin without anyone deciding to thin it, the way a coat wears through at the elbow first because that is where you lean.

Then she saw him at the top of the stairs, and every fair word left her the way birds leave a wire, all at once, for no reason she could name.

He came down slowly. He was carrying, she saw, the yellow umbrella, though it had not rained in a week, and she understood that he had brought it because it was hers, because he had been meaning to return it, and because returning a thing is a way of saying you have thought about the person it belongs to. He held it out before he reached her, as if it were a small flag of a country that no longer existed.

"You kept it," she said.

"I keep things," he said, and the plainness of it undid her more than any argument could have. They stood in the unlit end of the platform, not touching, the umbrella between them like a third person who knew them both too well to leave.

Somewhere down the line a signal changed. The rail began its thin electric hum, the sound of something arriving that could not be argued with.

Analyse how narrative perspective and voice convey Mira's state of mind in this passage.