Bege-105

Elective Course in English

UNDERSTANDING PROSE (BEGE -105)
Q.1

A.

Narrative prose: In these lines narrative prose is seen. As a narrative is a description of events. It
may deal with external or internal events.
In a narrative. We are carried along the stream of action. When we narrate a story, we
concentrate on the sequence of events. It is the action that grips the attention of the reader.

The writer makes no direct statement about the child having walked an incredible distance. He is
conveyed by reactions of the elders and especially that of his father.
The main theme of the story is that death is inescapable; humans often have the illusion that
through 'true love' nothing can touch us, and that love makes one whole. In order to succeed in
life, one must overcome these illusions.
Man does not contemplate the mortality of life when blinded by youth and courage. The guilt
which will inevitably haunt Arat over this unforgivable act betrayal of is veiled by the illusion
that love is worth fighting and sacrificing for. Arat, like all men, clung to the illusion of Utopia
and “a country where death is forgotten—where death is unknown” (Conrad, 1897) with
Diamelen, and later finds that the guilt of his betrayal both to his Rajah and his brother would
hang over him like the darkness of the night or the ghosts which the crew believed would
perpetually haunt his dwelling. In an insight into the heart of man, Arat states “What did I care
who died? I wanted peace in my own heart” (Conrad, 1897). The illusion of peace is an idea
which Conrad would be well versed in; a man who led life of torment, who allegedly
unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide at a young age, who saw the very animalistic nature of
man during his years exploring the uncharted colonies of Great Britain in the Navy and was the
victim of a torrid love affair himself.

B.
Narrative prose: In these lines narrative prose is seen. As a narrative is a description of events. It
may deal with external or internal events.
In a narrative. We are carried along the stream of action. When we narrate a story, we
concentrate on the sequence of events. It is the action that grips the attention of the reader.

This is from a travelogue written by vikarm Seth entitled from Heaven Lake, based on an
extraordinary adventurous journey from china through Tibet and Nepal to New Delhi.

The Blue Nile got the 'blue' part of its name because of its muddy color due to the huge amount
of fertile soil it erodes from the Ethiopian highlands. Why they called it blue rather than the more
logical color of brown, dark brown or even black is open to conjecture.
It is this spectacular flood of the Blue Nile that sets it apart from many other great river systems
of the world. Each year during the heavy rains, the Blue Nile swells to over 50 times its dry

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season size and carries with it a staggering 140 million tonnes of rich, fertile silt as it rages, thick
and brown, towards the Mediterranean sea.
The Blue Nile from the highlands of Ethiopia, and the White Nile from Lake Victoria meet in
Khartoum, and merge in what Arab poets call 'the longest kiss in history', to form the Nile river.
For most of the year, the Blue Nile provides little water compared to the White Nile, but in
summer it is very much the dominant tributary.
The Nile River is 6,700km long, and hence is the longest river in the world. Despite the fact that
the Nile flows through one of the harshest deserts, and travels the last 2,400km without a single
tributary, it never runs dry.
It is ironical that although the Blue Nile has such a big economic impact for Sudan and Egypt,
Ethiopia as yet has not benefited from the Blue Nile. Besides the natural features of the Nile
River, the fact that so many peoples and countries have vested interest in the river makes it an
extremely interesting geopolitical issue.

C.

Expository prose: Expository writing deals in definition, explanation or interrelation. It include

writing on science, law, philosophy, technology, political science, history and critism. Exposition
is a form of logical presentation.
The ageing process is associated with an increasing rate of morbidity, the period of time spent
sick before recovery or death. Thus, since the elderly population is increasing, more and more
people are going to require care.
But there is no any solid evidence about cause of this. Biological, psychological and
sociological, evidence are totally different by each other. In this view, we first need to gather
together to have a single myth about this.
Although the various symptoms of ageing appear separately in terms of the biological,
Psychological and social well-being of the individual, there is generally an interaction among
these various components. Therefore, if we are to find solutions to the many problems of ageing,
we need the cooperation of scientists from a number of different disciplines.

Q.2

“Misery the story id written is a straight forward style. Its quality is simplicity. Chekhov has an
eye for detail and he photographic and cinematographic realist. He tries his best to get a
photograph of a persons feeling. According to him art tells the truth and his story affirms the
truth about human behavior.

Misery is the strong of a father’s pain over the death of the son. The grief in written him and he
wanted to speak about the incident to lighten his burden. Some misery but there is no body to
listen him. The story describes the old man’s feeling to share his grief with others and able to
find compassionate audience and his final effort to disgorge his misery by talking to more, his
one and only companion.
The old man is in grief. He is a sledge driver. He is the protagonist of the story. The other
characters who appear briefly during the course of the story are riders on his sledge who have
neither the time nor the inclination to listen to him. They live in a world of their won and cannot
sympathetically relate to the old man in grief.

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In this one world “misery” the title accurately summarizes the mood of the story carries. It tells
us about the self centered, unresponsive and feeling grief of Iona Potapor, the old sledge driver
over the loss of his son and his attempts to share it with fellow travelers in his sledge.
Misery means a great suffering of the mind or body. Here the suffering is not physical but felt
within the heart. There can be no cure for emotional emotions within, as there are no listeners to
lend an ear. He has been rendered one with whom he can share his agony. Hi is severely along
and therefore is miserable.
Misery is a common feeling of human who hunts along person who wanted to share his feelings.
He wanted only a listener who may less his pain. His misery is immense. This pain’s immensity
is so that it may swamp the whole world. His feelings is lonely and he neither find a person to
h0ear his feelings no to lessen his pain.
“Misery” is good example of Chekhov’s typical theme and narrative structure. It does not focus
on everyday reality but centers on the psychological after month of an event that breaks up
everyday routine and leaves the central characters helpless. The rhythm of the sledge driver’s
life broke when he heard the death now of his own son. He needs to communicate his feeling of
loss of his fares. The story is not about an event it is rather about the lack of one.
Chekhov’s prose is lucid, simple and also in light vocabulary. He also uses metaphorical
language to recreate the scene consider the description of the sledge driver. The simile si apt for
the snow, the word white like ghost also indicates the listlessness of Iona over powered grief.

Q.3-

In literature “strem of consciousness’’ denotes a narrative technique by a’ which a writer chooses

to tell his/her story. This phrase was first used by William James to characterize the unknown
flow of thought and awareness in the waking mind. But James was talking with reference to
psychology. In literature, when a story runs in the mind of the main character, his/her senses
seem to work in the past. The character remembers his /her past and the flow of thought takes
unpack and forth. The thoughts, memories feeling and past Associations Create “The World of
the Novel”. Shashi Deshpande does not describe rains, nor does she tell us the locale of the
novel. From such a flow of thoughts we know that: the novel is set in Bombay, rains in coastal
areas are long and intense, and the time has passed (when the novel opened it was summer.
To convey the scenes the novelist use interior monologue, long introspective passages and
flashbacks. In interior monologue, the characters express their thought and feelings by talking
to themselves. The times are not clock time, it is psychological time, in literature many writers
have used the strem of consciousness technique but we can not say that they have all followed
the same pattern. They have perfected if from time to time by making minor changes, keeping
the main pattern intact.

The Binding Vine is a stream of consciousness novel because it is told from the consciousness of
the main character, Urmi. What happened to Urmi? Her daughter has died and she is grief-
stricken. Nobody tells us this fact. It is through Urmi’s laments that we get to know it. Her
consciousness works though association. Anu’s death reminds Urmi of Naiajji’s death, and
Balajji reminds her of her girlhood days in ranidurg. We are not told that Urmi stayed with her
grandparents. Urmi’s thoughts going back and forth reveal this fact. Her childhood was a happy
one, but she missed her parents and held Inni children may be happy and comfortable with their

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grandparents but they do not like to be away from their parents. Urmi’s thoughts also reveal to
us another fact that her relations with her Urmi’s papa took the decision to send her to Ranidurg.
Here we realize a significant social fact that women have no ‘voice’.

Q.4:-

Avoiding public, philosophical and didactic topics, Lamb dwelt imaginatively in the historical
past, or in that of his own memories and experiences, to create exquisitely beautiful essays are a
perfect blend of humour and pathos. A strong under current of his great misfortunes and pity
runs through most of his essays and it perhaps rightly believed that he hastened to laugh at
everything for fear of being obliged to weep. His subject matter is always intimately related to
himself. He projected in his highly personalizes essays the pretty the pretty, the humorous, the
pathetic in the life and incidents around him.
One of the devices that Lamb uses to provoke laughter in this essay is exaggeration. He succeeds
in exciting laughter by exaggerating the sheer absurdities in a particular situation. When Ho-ti
discover his son Bo-bo eating the roast pigs, he starts raining
Blows as thick as hail-stones in his errant son, which Bo-bo heeded not ‘any more than if they
had been flies.’ Enjoying the tickling pleasure of tasting the crackling, Bo-bo remains unmindful
of the beatings. Even while offering father his dainty mean, Bo-bo decides to keep the choice
parts for his own self. Lamb’s description of the scene is hilarious indeed.
Exaggeration is again employed by Lamb to create delightful humour when he describes how
the judge and jury respond to the crime of eating meat that was not raw. The jury fortunately had
their fingers burned in the same way and tried Bo-bo’s method of cooling them. And Bo-bo is
promptly acquitted. The description related to the ensuring event which combines mock
seriousness and gravity is humorous indeed. Lamb proceeds gravely.
There is also abundant humour in the manner in which Lame describes how ‘a sage arose, like
our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be
cooked (burnt as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. The
situation is humorous again when Lamb addresses the matter of his own liking for the roast pig
and describes with elaborate care the process of roasting the pig and how meekly the roasted
creature lies on the dinner table. Lamb almost grows ecstatic in his narration while describing his
reference for the delicacy.

Q.5

Nehru was not a professional man of letters, nor a professional historian. During summer of
1928, 10-year-old Indira Gandhi was in Mussoorie. Her father Jawaharlal Nehru was then busy
working in Allahabad. During summer, Nehru wrote several letters to tell her stories about when
and how the earth was made, how animal and human life came into existence, and how societies
and civilizations evolved throughout the world.
In his letters, he speaks of races, early and present-day faiths and beliefs of religion, the
beginning of communication using languages by making sounds that are meaningful, how
writing evolved through meaningful marks, and how the different languages were related. He
also referred to civilization and division of labour, which paved the way to the patriarch and the
rule by kings and formation of kingdoms. He also wrote about trade and travel.

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While in prison, cut off from active life and from his beloved daughter, Nehru decided to make
use of the available time to write a brief and simple account of the history of the world. Nehru
himself admits that he is not a historian but has attempted to put together facts and ideas he had
culled from books. Very often, the facts of history are over run by his own ideas and
philosophitic thinking.
The quest of man, the fifty-sixth in the series of letters I glimpses of world history and the first
that he wrote from the district jail of Dehradun, takes us back to origin of human civilization is
that it owes its existence and perpetuation to the genius of the human mind. It is the eternal
curiosity of the human mind to find out and learn more and more about the world that started
man on this quest. In this letter, Nehru goes beyond historical dates and facts to focus on man’s
innate quest to know understand the world around him.

Q.6

The first ironical incident is the falling asleep of Vimla when Maganlal is offering his
explanation, which according to him displays a “….truly edifying elevation of thought. “Next is
the fact that Maganlal does not find anything wrong in imitating. Hollywood movies but thinks
of his stories as simply a “synthesis of contrary trends and values”. Then, Maganlal starts
spending his time secretively in order to write a manuscript to please Vimla and instead this
leads to Vimla’s suspicious of a liaison with another woman. Again, it is ironical that it is the
imagined infidelity which makes Sunil thinks that Maganal has scored a point over his sister.
Finally, the most ironical of all is the effect of Maganal’s false confession on both Sunil and
Vimla. In fact, the very title of the story. The other woman is quit ironical because usually a
story is titled after the main character or situation but here, the other woman does not even exist.

Another important feature of the prose style is the use of parentheses or round brackets to give
little places of facts and thoughts in between description of another place or incident. The story is
not told in a linear fashion. We come to know of the cause of the tension between the couple
through maganlal’s reminiscences while is sitting at his desk. There is an ample use if adjectives
that allows for powerful description. There is playful use of language to produce humor for
example:

Here, we see the use of the device called “juxtaposition” which means that two contrasting things
are placed together. Maganlal is here countering Vimla’s criticism of Jit, but this is described in
the same sentence as his taking off the formal clothes that he had worn to the Silver Jubilee
celebration further, the phrase “wearing the pants in the family” means that he is the master in
the house but he then takes off the literal pants that he is wearing. Thus, the juxtaposition of the
proverbial and the literal creates the effects of humor and displays Dina Mehta’s expert use of
language.

Q.7

(i)

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The rise of the short Story: The short story as a literary from began to be written in the early
nineteenth century. Yet only before the last decade of the nineteenth century the term Short
story’ was used.

The rise of the short story can be attributed to the following factors:
(a) The rise of the reading public. In fact more and more people began to read fiction in the
nineteenth century;
(b) The increase in the number of periodicals publishing fiction;
(c) Widespread literacy, education was now more widely accessible;
(d) Hurry and pace of modern life due to which the readers discontinued reading novels.
The novels written in those days were rather lengthy. A single novel usually came in three
volumes. Now-a-days people do not have the time to read novels. Instead short stories are
growing popular as they can be read while traveling or relaxing and do not require a
substantial investment of time.
The Development of the short story: The short story developed in the hands of various
writers. Many of these were also novelists. Some well known story writers, who were
masters of this art, contributed to its development are as under.
(a) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): He is an American novelist and short story writer.
(b) Edgar Allan Poe: He is a famous nineteenth century American short story writer. The
stories of the above writers are full of honor and the supernatural. Poe’s story’ The
Masque of the Red Death’ is worth reading.
(c) Guy de Maupassant (1850-93): A French write. He claims to be one of the masters of the
short stories. He wrote about momentous events of his short stories.

(ii) As in cricket, so in a novel, knowledge of different aspects would help us decide this all
important question: What to expect of a novel hen we get to read one? We all know that learning
the rules of game is no substitute for playing the game. But let us now allow ourselves to forget
that without this knowledge and efficiency. We shall acquaint with various aspects of the novel
viz, Plot, characterization, Narrative Techniques, Style, Time and Place and Themes as also their
interrelationships’. Broadly speaking, every known literary work, the novel included, could be
said to have two basic aspects i.e. ‘content’ and ‘form’. Put simply, content would refer to ‘how’
it says whatever it does. These two questions relating to the ‘what’ or ‘how’ of a work are of
paramount importance to anyone who wishes to unlock the mysteries of any literary work.
Everyone recognizes that there is a close relationship between these two aspects though the
opinions on the exact nature of this relationship are like to vastly differ. As a matter of fact,
there is no way in which we could possibly look at this relationship. To say, then, that there are
many ways of looking at this question as are the numerous literary works available to us would
be no exaggeration.
Anything that is written opposed to the oral, so to speak must, of necessity, have a shape, a form
or a design. Since the fat of writing itself is, on one level, an act of giving a definite form or
shape to the letters and words. The novel as a written form must show a high degree of respect
for the conscious design or formal features. Besides, we also know that a novelist always puts
himself/ herself through a rigorous process of selection, rejection and ordering of his/her material
before s/he actually decides to present it in one fictional mode or the other. All this clearly
suggests that in the case of a novel, at least (though sometimes it may be true of other genres as

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well) understanding of the ‘content’ depends largely upon and is conditioned by our
understanding of its ‘form’. In other words, the only way in which we can know; what’ the
novel has to say is by first addressing ourselves to this absorbing question of ‘how’ it has been
designed or constructed. This is as much to say that novel should preferably be mediated via the
form. But it does not mean that the content is, in any way either insignificant or of secondary
importance.