English Literature - Prose and Drama: 11 MCQs with Answers

In Gordon Cook and Alan East’s narrative ‘We’re Not Afraid to Die… if We Can All Be Together’, the family has survived a savage storm in the Southern Indian Ocean and is desperately searching for the tiny island of Ile Amsterdam. Jonathan, the narrator’s six-year-old son, is the first to sight land and cries out that it is there in front of them, as big as a battleship. The stark outline of the island rising out of the sea signals rescue after days of pumping water, and the comparison conveys both its size and the children’s relief.

In Pearl S. Buck’s story ‘The Enemy’, Dr Sadao Hoki, a Japanese surgeon, finds a wounded American prisoner of war washed ashore near his house during the Second World War. Torn between his professional duty as a doctor and his patriotic duty to his country, Sadao himself remarks that the kindest thing would be to put the man back into the sea. The line captures his inner conflict, since sheltering an enemy soldier could cost him and his family their lives. Ultimately his humanity prevails and he operates on the man and helps him escape.

Kamala Das, who later wrote in Malayalam under the pen name Madhavikutty, first serialised her autobiography in Malayalam as ‘Ente Katha’, which literally means ‘My Story’. She subsequently rewrote it in English, and the English version appeared in 1976 under that translated title. The book created a sensation for its unflinching treatment of a woman’s emotional and sexual life within a conservative society, and it remains one of the most discussed autobiographies in Indian writing. Her poem ‘My Mother at Sixty-six’ is prescribed in the school syllabus.

William Douglas begins his autobiographical essay ‘Deep Water’ by recalling his terror of water and by quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line that all we have to fear is fear itself. The allusion frames the whole essay, because Douglas is describing how a near-drowning at the Y.M.C.A. pool left him with a paralysing phobia and how he later conquered it with the help of an instructor and sheer determination. The chapter is thus a study in the psychology of fear, and Roosevelt’s words supply its guiding idea.

‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ records the life of Annelies Marie Frank, universally known as Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl who hid with her family in a concealed annexe in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. She began the diary on her thirteenth birthday in 1942 and addressed her entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty. The family was betrayed in 1944 and Anne died at Bergen-Belsen. Her father Otto, the only survivor, published the diary in 1947, and an extract titled ‘From the Diary of Anne Frank’ is prescribed in school.

Guy de Maupassant published the story in 1884 under the French title ‘La Parure’, which means ‘the ornament’ or ‘the set of jewels’; in English it is universally known as ‘The Necklace’. It tells of Mathilde Loisel, a discontented clerk’s wife who borrows a diamond necklace to attend a ball, loses it, and spends ten years of grinding poverty repaying the loan taken to replace it, only to learn at the end that the original was an imitation worth almost nothing. The story is a classic example of the ironic twist ending.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s humorous essay ‘The Luncheon’, the struggling young writer watches in horror as his guest, who claims never to eat more than one thing for luncheon, orders one costly item after another. The giant asparagus arrives swimming in melted butter, and the narrator confesses that its smell tickled his nostrils as the nostrils of Jehovah were tickled by the burnt offerings of the virtuous Semites. The biblical comparison is deliberately grand and heightens the comedy of a man who is calculating whether he can pay the bill.

Bama is the pen name of Faustina Mary Fatima Rani, a Tamil Dalit Christian writer and teacher. Writing in Tamil, she recorded the double oppression of caste and gender in her autobiographical novel ‘Karukku’, which appeared in 1992 and is regarded as a landmark of Dalit literature. An extract from it is prescribed in the school syllabus along with a passage from Zitkala-Sa in the chapter ‘Memories of Childhood’. Her later works include ‘Sangati’ and ‘Vanmam’, and her prose is noted for its use of spoken Dalit Tamil.

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, formally the National Theatre of Ireland, was founded in 1904 chiefly by W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, with the support of Edward Martyn and John Millington Synge. It grew out of the Irish Literary Theatre and became the artistic centre of the Irish Literary Revival, staging plays that drew on Irish myth, folklore and peasant speech in place of imported English drama. Synge’s ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ famously caused riots there in 1907. Georgie Hyde-Lees was Yeats’s wife and Anne Gregory the subject of one of his poems.

In Vallikkannan’s story ‘Madam Rides the Bus’, eight-year-old Valli watches the bus that passes along the street outside her house and dreams of the six-mile journey to town. A thoroughfare is a public road or street that runs from one place to another and is open at both ends to through traffic, and it is generally busy. The word is used in the chapter for the main road along which the bus travels, the world outside the little village that fascinates the child and finally teaches her a sobering lesson about life and death.