What the exam asks
On Section I, questions rarely ask you simply to spot a simile or a recurring image. Instead, they ask what a comparison or pattern accomplishes—how it reveals a narrator’s attitude, characterizes a protagonist’s internal conflict, or establishes a thematic tension. On Section II, top-scoring Q2 and Q3 essays track patterns across a passage or novel rather than treating images in isolation, showing how concrete details signify abstract ideas.
Core ideas
Symbolic settings (FIG-1.AB, FIG-1.AC)
A physical setting becomes symbolic when the narrative associates a specific place, environment, or time with an abstract concept—such as an emotion, an ideology, or a belief system.
- Text-specific symbolic settings: Created by how characters interact with or perceive a space (e.g., a stifling, over-furnished parlor that comes to represent Victorian social conformity).
- Settings with long-established associations: Many settings carry near-universal cultural resonances across literature (such as a crossroads suggesting a moral decision, a wilderness representing untamed freedom or moral testing, or a threshold indicating transition). Writers either lean into these traditional associations or deliberately subvert them.
Motifs (FIG-1.AD)
A motif is a pattern of objects, images, or contrasts that keeps coming back across a work (or a large part of it); each return draws attention to an important idea.