Approaching Drama and Prose (Scottish Highers English): Revision Notes

Approaching Drama and Prose

Understanding the Critical Reading paper

The Critical Reading paper consists of two sections, each worth equal marks:

• Section 1: Scottish Text (20 marks)
• Section 2: Critical Essay (20 marks)

Together, these sections account for 40% of your total Higher English grade. This makes Critical Reading one of the most substantial components of your assessment.

To succeed in Critical Reading, you need a thorough understanding of how texts are constructed. For drama and prose, this means recognising structural elements such as beginnings, endings, character presentation and development, conflict, setting in time and place, narrative technique, turning points, and climax. You must also identify and analyse the themes present in your studied texts. Themes might include family relationships, jealousy, sacrifice, societal values, violence, restoration of friendship, love, unrequited love, the moral and psychological growth of a protagonist, grief, or alienation.

The two fundamental questions

Drama and prose texts may look different on the page, but they share enough similarities in how we analyse them to be studied together.

Understanding themes

A theme is the underlying message or central idea that a text explores about human experience and the human condition. Every story, from folklore to contemporary novels, makes some form of comment about people, society, or the world around us.

Novels, short stories, plays, films, and television dramas all explore themes such as love, jealousy, snobbery, pride, cruelty, rejection, or ambition. As readers or viewers, we recognise these themes and often re-examine our own experiences in light of what we have read or seen. The phrase from Macbeth, "vaulting ambition", captures how literature gives us language to understand complex human motivations.

Your task as a critic is to examine how writers manipulate setting, characterisation, or symbolism to convey themes in ways that readers can recognise, relate to, and ultimately understand.

You need to know about techniques such as narrative structure, characterisation, setting (time and place), symbolism, exposition, language, uses of conflict, turning point, climax, resolution, and dénouement. Some or all of these are used by writers to portray themes. Critical essay questions frequently focus on such techniques.

The role of the author, narrator, and meaning

Some readers believe that a work of fiction or drama is simply a means by which an author communicates a message, and that readers must decode that message. This leads to statements like: "Clearly, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald is criticising the moral vacuum and snobbery of 1920s America."

However, we cannot know with certainty what authors mean. We cannot text Shakespeare to ask what he intended. What matters above all is the text itself, not the author's intentions. Meaning has much less to do with what the author intended than with the reader's own interpretation and understanding. Meaning emerges from the relationship that you, as the reader, have with the text. The reading process involves bringing your experiences, sensitivities, and developed reading skills to the text so that you can interpret the experiences it presents in your own terms.

The role of the narrator

The author does not tell the story directly. Instead, the author creates a narrator or a narrative voice. Of course, authors sometimes intrude to make a comment or take over for a moment. Henry James often intrudes to make comments, and Jane Austen frequently makes her authorial voice heard. However, your primary focus should be on the narrator, the voice that tells the story.

The term point of view means the same as narrative technique: the way in which a story is told. Although point of view is really an aspect of fiction, plays can also have narrators, such as Alfieri in A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller or Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

Six types of narration

There are various ways in which a novel can be narrated. The most important are:

1. Omniscient narrator

The story is told by a narrator who has been created by the author. The author places the narrator in a position of knowing everything about all settings and all characters. This includes what characters say, hear, see, feel, taste, and smell. More than that, the omniscient narrator knows characters' most intimate thoughts and motivations better than the characters know themselves. The omniscient narrator knows everything.

2. First person narration

The story is told by one of the characters. The advantage of this method is that the reader gets to know the character intimately and probably grows to like them. The disadvantage is that the character telling the story must be present at all times, or must rely on others for information about episodes that took place before the novel began or about scenes at which they were not present.

The reader's information is filtered through the mind of the character narrating the story, which means there could be bias of which the reader is unaware. We cannot know the intimate thoughts of other characters because the narrator, being a character in the novel and not omniscient, cannot know them. The character's narration can be prejudiced and therefore unreliable. In The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is clearly prejudiced in favour of Gatsby, rendering his narrative fairly unreliable at times.

3. Third person narration

The story is told by a third person narrator, but this time the narrator focuses only on one character and all events are seen through that character's eyes. The story is told in the third person, but since the narrator focuses on a particular character, that character must be present at all times or must rely on others for information. Many short stories are told in third person narration, where the focus is restricted to one character.

4. Framed narrative

The story is told within a story. A character narrates the story to another character who then narrates the story to the reader, or a character in the story refers to another character who then tells the story.

One of the most famous examples of a framed narrative is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. One of the men on a boat waiting for the tide to turn on the Thames retells a story told to him by Marlow about his expedition to the Congo. He actually quotes Marlow, but occasionally interrupts Marlow's story to make comments of his own. It is 'framed' in that the author creates the first narrator who then makes use of a second narrator to tell the story to the reader.

Another example is Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, in which there are in effect three narrators: an unnamed narrator and his friend, who is reading a manuscript written by a governess, now dead, but previously known to the friend. The story itself is told by the governess.

5. Free indirect discourse

The narrative is in the third person but written in such a way that the reader has access to the thinking of the characters in the story. This type of narration, developed by Jane Austen, is fairly common. There are many examples in The Cone Gatherers by Robin Jenkins.

6. Interior monologue

The narrative is presented as the thoughts of one of the characters as they are going through their head. The narration is in the first person, but what often happens is that the narration switches from third person to first in order to make clear the character's thoughts as they form in their mind.

In Under the Skin by Michel Faber, the novel begins in the third person, focusing on the main character, Isserley, but then switches to interior monologue as we are presented with the thoughts of one of the hitch-hikers whom she picks up. Here is an example from Chapter 1 of the novel, showing the hitch-hiker thinking:

"She drove like a little old lady. Fifty miles an hour, absolute max. And that shoddy old anorak of hers on the back seat – what was that all about? She had a screw loose, probably. Nutter, probably. And she talked funny – foreign, definitely."

You can tell right away from the sentence structure that these are the character's thoughts, exactly as he thinks them. The short sentences and minor sentences (sentences without a finite verb, such as "Nutter, probably.") reveal the character's thoughts forming in real time.

Be sure you check the novel you are preparing for the exam to see which of these techniques applies to the way the story is being told.

The role of time

Time plays an important role in the structure of fiction and drama. There are four ways in which the use of time matters:

(i) The time in which the novel is set

In Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, the very first word of the first chapter is "1801", a very precise indication of the setting in time, with all the connotations and implications of a new millennium.

Sometimes we are not told the exact setting in time, but we can usually work it out from the level of technology present. If there are stagecoaches pulled by horses, the chances are the setting is pre-twentieth century.

(ii) The time when the work was written (context)

This is an important aspect of critical analysis of fiction and drama. No literary text is written in a vacuum. It is embedded in the historical, cultural, literary, societal, and political context of its time.

For example, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is very much part of the era of the American Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 almost to the Second World War. Set in the 1930s, Of Mice and Men deals with the plight of landless migrant workers whose lives were the antithesis of the American Dream.

That All My Sons by Arthur Miller was written just after the Second World War heightens the significance of Joe Keller's actions during the war in supplying faulty aircraft parts to the armed forces.

(iii) The timescale over which the story is told

Sometimes the narrator tells us when the story begins, but often we have to work this out by paying attention to clues given by the narrator.

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the narrator, is narrating the story in 1923, "when [he] came back from the East last autumn", the year after all the events had taken place. The technique is obviously flashback: the events that he recalls in 1923 are the events that took place in 1922.

The Great Gatsby begins in the early summer of 1922 and is set over a relatively short period of time, months rather than years. Short timescales tend to create intensity and allow for close examination of theme, whereas novels spread over long periods of time tend to allow for patterns to be detected and for several themes to be explored.

Short stories are often set over a very short period of time.

(iv) The time when the novel is read

It is important to bear in mind that there is inevitably a gap in time between when the work was written and the beginning of the twenty-first century when you are reading it. We should be aware that we as readers are possessed of knowledge of all that has happened during that gap and that therefore we should be aware of how that knowledge might influence our reading of the text.

The role of structure

One of the most important technical aspects of a text is its structure: the way in which the story has been put together by the author. All texts (poetry as well as novels, short stories, plays, essays, pieces of journalism, television dramas, and films) have been carefully structured by the writer or director. Our job as critics is to unpick or deconstruct the ways in which the text has been built up.

The word 'structure' usually refers to the physical dimensions of objects or buildings (length, height, width), and each of these dimensions can be measured. The structure of the Forth Bridge, however complex, can nevertheless be measured. When it comes to written texts, though, these physical dimensions do not apply. What does apply, however, is the so-called 'fourth dimension': time.

The structure of a novel or a play, then, has to do with the way in which the author deploys the use of time. When you tell a story to your parents about what happened in school, you automatically structure your story in time: you give it a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

Analepsis is a term used to refer to a scene at an earlier point in the story, while prolepsis is a term used to refer to a moment later in the chronological sequence of the story. A proleptic scene can be a moment of foreshadowing.

Linear structure

It is exactly the same with a novel or play: there is a beginning stage, a middle stage, and an end stage. Many novels, more or less, follow this same pattern: a straightforward linear development.

Some stories, however, reverse the beginning and middle stages to form flashback, where the narrative begins in the middle of the story and then goes back to a beginning further back in time.

Other stories, from time to time throughout the narrative, have scenes in which reference is made to points back in time, before the beginning, to give a character or the reader information about what happened before the story began. That kind of return to the past is not so much a flashback as an analeptic scene.

Episodic structure

Another structural technique is where the text is in episodes: scenes that appear to be almost contemporaneous but which are related or linked thematically. Orwell's essay Marrakech is the perfect example of episodic structure. Although the episodes can take place at the same time or at different times, nevertheless each episode in itself is linear, that is, structured in time. Film and some modern novels sometimes use such episodic structure.

Remember that techniques are there to contribute to and portray theme. Many critical reading questions ask you to demonstrate the ways in which techniques do just that, though they may use different wording for theme, such as 'concerns of the text' or 'your understanding of the play/novel as a whole'.

The six aspects of structure

The various stages in the structure of a novel or a play are often used as the basis for critical essay questions. For example, there are often questions about beginnings, turning points, conflict, climaxes, and endings. Such questions apply to drama as much as prose fiction.

Here are the six aspects of structure in drama and novels:

1. Exposition

The exposition of the story is where the reader is given information about everything they need to know to understand the story, including setting, characterisation, symbolism, and who is to tell the story (the narrative technique).

The very beginning of a novel or a play is often referred to as the exposition, where, in a novel, the point of view is made clear and we are introduced to the setting, the characters, symbolism, and the plot. The exposition establishes:

• Point of view
• Setting
• Plot
• Symbolism
• Characterisation
• Tone
• Dialogue

The exposition is not just the first few pages of the novel but can sometimes stretch to a few chapters, until all these various aspects have been introduced. You should analyse each of these aspects for the ways in which theme is being established.

Sometimes, a writer chooses to subvert the exposition, deliberately obscuring aspects of point of view, plot, characterisation, symbolism, tone, and dialogue in order to confuse or bewilder readers by leading them in the wrong direction for dramatic effect. Does this apply to the text you are studying? Michel Faber's Under the Skin is an example of subverted exposition.

2. Development of conflict

Next we have the development of conflict. Stories, especially dramatic stories, cannot exist without conflict.

Novels and drama really have to involve conflict. Sometimes, in the more basic plots, the conflict is straightforward: good versus evil, illustrated by stories about cops-versus-robbers or MI5-versus-terrorists or David-versus-Goliath (a small, insignificant person versus a large, powerful corporation).

Sometimes, however, the conflict is not derived from the opposition of 'goodies' or 'baddies' but stems from two sets of opposing attitudes or values. Television serial dramas, such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Eastenders, and Hollyoaks, tend to explore this conflict of opposing sets of attitudes or values between or within families.

More 'serious' novels and plays, however, invariably explore the conflict between the good and the morally deficient. In such texts, conflict is established between the main character or hero and what are called the antagonistic forces, usually set in motion by a catalyst, then developed as the narrative progresses. It takes time (usually) to build up the conflict, the author developing it in all kinds of ways, some explicit, some very subtle.

A catalyst is a scene or event or even the entrance of a character, the effect of which is to trigger or speed up the conflict within the story. For example, the scene with the ghost (Act I scenes 4 and 5) is the catalyst in Hamlet; the catalyst in Macbeth is the scene where the witches meet Macbeth and Banquo.

Internal conflict is also sometimes introduced: conflict within the hero himself or herself, involving self-doubt, dilemma, or uncertainty. Sometimes such internal conflict also develops among the various other 'good' or main characters.

3. Turning point

Next is the turning point, where the narrative changes direction, where the fortunes or fate of the main character alter and where we get a glimpse of the probable outcome of the narrative. The turning point is sometimes referred to by the term peripeteia.

The turning point of a novel or play is invariably the scene during which the action of the story 'turns', where the narrative changes direction, where the fortunes or fate of the main character alter, where we get a glimpse of the probable outcome of the narrative. The turning point can also be when an action of the main character can cause a downward spiral or even the death of others. It is usually the pivotal scene, the scene about which everything turns or starts to unfold.

When it comes to the play or novel that you are studying, it may not be immediately obvious which scene forms the turning point, but make sure that you know what you are looking for:

• (a) the point at which the 'wheel of fortune' begins to turn
• (b) where the descent towards the inevitable ending begins to take shape
• (c) a scene which changes for the worse the main character's fortunes
• (d) a scene where at least one of the main characters understands or learns or realises something important that is usually distressing or disturbing

Be prepared to relate the disturbing nature of this scene to your overall understanding of the play.

Be sure that you open up all the possibilities of a critical essay question. Any turning point is bound to be, for example, disturbing or moving or having tragic consequences since it marks the beginning of the demise of the main character. If you are asked about such a scene, consider the turning point as a possibility for your answer.

4. Climax

Thereafter, there is the climax, a technical term meaning the final point in the narrative where the protagonist (the main character) undergoes the very worst that can happen to them.

The climax of a narrative is the final point in the narrative that eventually leads to the ultimate demise of the main character (if the text is a tragedy) and to the resolution of the conflict and the theme(s). In comedies the climax often leads to a happy resolution of the conflict.

First of all, when considering the climax of a play, you should try to identify the ways in which the dramatist has built tension, culminating in the climax. Think about the thematic and dramatic significance of the scene. Does the scene resolve the themes, the concerns, of the play and in what ways is the scene dramatic? When you are asked about dramatic scenes, think of dramatic irony as well as emotion and tension.

Dramatic irony is when at least one person onstage is not aware of something significant, though the audience is fully aware. For example, when King Duncan in Macbeth says of Macbeth's residence: "This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses", Duncan is clueless that he is about to be murdered there, though the audience is aware of what is about to happen.

With literary criticism there is no right or wrong. In any given novel or play, it is possible to argue for different scenes to be the turning point or the climax. What matters is your ability to present an argument, to make a case for any given scene to be the turning point or the climax or the resolution or the dénouement, as long as you present relevant and convincing evidence drawn from the text.

You should by now have worked out which scene is the turning point and which the climax of the texts you are studying.

5. Resolution

There then follows the resolution of the conflict and, ultimately, of the theme.

The resolution scene is the point at which the conflict between the hero and the antagonist becomes disentangled, thus resolving the issues.

6. Dénouement

The final stage is referred to as the dénouement, which draws together all the issues/themes and usually involves the ideas of restorative justice and redemption. 'Normal' social and moral order is restored.

The dénouement is the point at which the other characters return to a different but more 'normal' way of life. You must realise by now that the climax, resolution and dénouement can almost run into one another.

Remember!