Dear Dr Morrison
My English exam is a week tomorrow! I am trying my best not to panic, but I am not sure how I will be able to study for it! I need to know the underlying themes presented by William Golding regarding the sense of good and evil around Ralph and Jack?! Help me!
I.N. Truble
‘Dr’ Morrison writes…
Mr Truble, you are right to say that the ideas of good and evil surround Jack. The easiest way for me to answer is to provide you with a list of one-word themes linked to this issue:
- Choice… to what extent do we all choose to go in a particular direction, or are we pushed?
- Age... all arguments about good and evil need to take into account the youth of the boys
- Individuality… can we sum up a person as being ‘good’ or ‘evil’ – is it that simple?
- Realism… the initial ‘setting up’ of Ralph as good and Jack as evil is complicated as we see that Ralph has taken part in the death of Simon and so on. Golding wants to show us a realistic group of children. This is one reason why the book has ‘endured’
- Judgement… the characters are very starkly described and represent very different things. They also perform very powerful deeds. All of this asks the reader to judge who is ‘good’ or ‘evil’ or where they lie in between these definitions.
Thanks for the question!
CM
What order are the papers in?
‘Dr’ Morrison writes… I hope you have your exam timetable. Literature is first on Tuesday. Then it is English Paper 1, then English Paper 2!
CM
Hi, do we need to know every poem in each section? Or would it be a better method to analyse 3 -4 in each section very well? (since we can choose 3 of them out of the 4 in the exam!)
Hi,
My advice varies depending on the paper.
Firstly, the literature paper…
It is fine to know some poems better than others, it is almost bound to happen. However, I think you need to know all of them to the level where you feel confident articulating the poem’s themes. The thing to remember is that you will not always have the same level of choice as you describe: you may be told to write about 2 or 3 named poems, leaving you to choose only 1 or 2. Also, if you choose to revise some more than others the ones you become familiar with may not fit in with the topic of the question.
Secondly, English Paper 2…
You will have studied one of the two clusters in detail and may have ‘dipped’ into the other one. There are two questions to choose from: question one will name a poem from cluster one, and question two will name a poem from cluster two. Unless you know both clusters equally well, go for the appropriate question! In effect, you won’t have a choice of question here, which means you are stuck with the named poem. Therefore, you need to know all eight of the ‘Other Cultures’ poem in your cluster equally well.
