What the exam asks
Remember the strict no-reuse rule across the course: a literary work used in your individual oral (or the HL essay) cannot be used again in Paper 2.
- Paper 2 (SL and HL): You have 1 hour 45 minutes to answer one of four general, conceptual questions in a closed-book comparative essay on two literary works. It is marked out of 25: Criterion A (Knowledge, understanding and interpretation, 5 marks), Criterion B1 (Analysis and evaluation of textual features and/or authorial choices, 5 marks), Criterion B2 (Comparative analysis, 5 marks), Criterion C (Focus and organization, 5 marks), and Criterion D (Language, 5 marks). Because Kafka’s stories constitute one work, you should discuss at least two stories in a Paper 2 essay to show knowledge of the whole work.
- Individual oral (SL and HL): A 10-minute prepared response followed by 5 minutes of teacher questions (40 marks total) examining how a global issue is presented in one literary work and one non-literary body of work, using a continuous extract of up to 40 lines from each.
- HL essay (HL only): A 1,200–1,500-word formal essay (20 marks) exploring a broad line of inquiry across the collection or an extended story.
Core ideas
Matching the stories to Paper 2 question types
Every Paper 2 question asks how two works present or use a literary concept. To score high marks in Criterion B1, anchor every theme immediately in a sustained authorial choice (using David Wyllie’s translation for The Metamorphosis and Before the Law, and Ian Johnston’s for the rest).
| General Paper 2 question focus | Best Kafka stories to use | Kafka’s sustained authorial choices (Criterion B1) |
|---|---|---|
| A character changed by events | The Metamorphosis (Gregor’s irreversible change from Part I to III); A Report for an Academy (Red Peter’s forced assimilation); In the Penal Colony (the Officer stepping under his own machine). | The matter-of-fact opening stating the impossible as already done; third-person narration locked inside one consciousness; a first-person address that performs humanity while revealing its cost. |
| One character set against another / Parent and child | The Judgment (Georg vs his father); The Metamorphosis (Mr Samsa’s stick, newspaper, and apple); In the Penal Colony (Officer vs Traveller); A Hunger Artist (artist vs panther); Before the Law (man vs doorkeeper). | The sudden spatial and physical reversal (the frail father rising huge on the bed); the family as an economic unit that consumes the child; paired contrasting figures at the close. |
| Power, justice and injustice | In the Penal Colony (the Harrow inscribing “Be just!”); Before the Law (the doorkeeper blocking the open gate); The Judgment (the father’s verdict of drowning). | Law presented as an illegible text nobody can read; the detached spectator’s position; a judicial sentence delivered without evidence or trial. |
| What is left unsaid / The outsider | The Metamorphosis (Gregor behind his locked door losing human speech); A Hunger Artist (his whispered final confession); Before the Law (the parable’s refusal to explain); A Report for an Academy (an ape among academics). | Deadpan narration that reports without explaining; the structural gap where a reason should be; the physical frame or cage turning an outsider into a spectacle. |
| Place, time, motifs and structure | Place: Gregor’s bedroom vs the flat; the sandy penal valley; the circus cage; the law’s doorway. Past: the family’s debt; the friend in Russia; the Old Commandant’s diagrams. Motifs: doors and locks, the rotting apple, animal bodies (vermin, ape, panther, the Condemned Man’s “dog-like resignation”). | Domestic or claustrophobic thresholds that measure power; titles that misdirect (A Report for an Academy promises science but gives a confession); endings that pass coldly from the dead protagonist to the thriving survivors (Grete stretching on the tram; the heavy traffic on the bridge; the vibrant panther). |