What the exam asks
In Paper 2 (25 marks, closed book), you compare and/or contrast two literary works in response to one of four general questions. Because you do not have the books in the exam room, examiners do not expect quotations, least of all long word-for-word ones. Instead, Criterion B1 (5 marks) rewards how well you analyse and evaluate small-scale textual features (prose style, tone, motifs) and/or broader authorial choices (narrative perspective, characterization, structural shifts, pacing and endings). Criterion B2 (5 marks) rewards how your comparison of those choices deepens your argument.
In the individual oral you have a clean copy of your extract (no more than 40 lines) in front of you, and in the HL essay (HL only) you work from the whole text, so in both you must pair those broader structural choices with close analysis of specific sentences, diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure).
Core ideas
1. Narrative perspective and voice
Who tells the story controls what the reader knows and how we judge events. Always separate the author (who crafts the work) from the narrator (the voice inside the text).
| Choice | How it works | Typical effect (for evaluation) |
|---|---|---|
| First-person (I/we) | Narrated by a character inside the story (protagonist or witness). | Creates intimacy and immediacy, but limits knowledge to one mind and invites bias. |
| Unreliable or child narrator | A narrator whose self-deception, youth or prejudice distorts the truth. | Creates dramatic irony: the reader reads between the lines, judging the gap between what the narrator says and what actually happens. |
| Third-person limited | He/she/they, anchored inside one character’s consciousness at a time. | Balances closeness to a character’s inner life with narrative control. |
| Third-person omniscient | An all-knowing voice that moves freely between minds, places and times. | Allows sweeping social commentary, moral judgement and ironic contrast between characters. |
| Free indirect discourse | Third-person narration that slips into a character’s own vocabulary, idioms and emotional rhythm without quotation marks. | Blurs narrator and character, creating subtle empathy or gentle irony as we hear the character’s raw thoughts inside the narrator’s sentence. |
2. Characterization, setting and symbol
Writers build characters through direct description, action, dialogue (including subtext—what is left unsaid) and character foils (secondary characters whose traits contrast with the protagonist’s to highlight a specific quality).
Setting is never mere backdrop. Analyse it as:
- Social and historical microcosm: a household, village or workplace that embodies the rules and hierarchies of a wider society.
- Psychological mirror: an environment (claustrophobic rooms, barren landscapes) that externalizes a character’s inner state.
- Motif and symbol: a recurring object, sound or spatial boundary (a motif) that gathers thematic weight across the narrative until it functions as a symbol of a larger concept (such as colonial incursion, lost innocence or class immobility).