Introduction
The tenth in the EnglishEdu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature.
This guide explores how to analyse narrative viewpoint in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.
Narrative viewpoint: Atonement by Ian McEwan
The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to analyse a text closely in terms of narrative viewpoint is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully chosen quotations in a variety of ways. These bullet points also include commentaries which aim to explain how and why such sections have been analysed and what they could highlight within the main text, contextually and thematically.
There are, of course, many more things that could be said about each extract, but it’s hoped that it will prove useful in your initial teaching stages to model it using the examples and then to ask students to find other things that they could analyse themselves as well as to consider ‘alternative’ interpretations and to derive possible contextual aspects.
From Atonement by Ian McEwan
The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box...
