Instructions: Choose ONE of the passages below and analyze it in terms of the narrator.
• First: Locate your chosen passage in your own text; read it several times closely and think about
it in terms of the narrator (e.g., voice, stance, personality, motivation, reliability, control, etc.).
• Next: Develop a specific, unified thesis that addresses the narrator as presented in this passage,
but also nods to the narrator’s effect throughout the narrative. As with Essay 1, do not waste your
words on a lengthy or generalized introduction. Get right into it!
• Then: Construct a series of body paragraphs offering specific textual evidence supporting your thesis.
• Finally: Offer a brief conclusion paragraph that revisits (and potentially expands) your thesis.
This is the passage:As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he
now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a
memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else he could have done. He could not
have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had
done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how
lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely
too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory — if anyone remembered him.
It was after nine o’clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the
Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where
they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed
to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life
from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.
When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards
Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope
and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those
venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had
been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life
and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame.
—Joyce, “A Painful Case”
Use the order calculator below and get started! Contact our live support team for any assistance or inquiry.
[order_calculator]