Model Answers
Answers to dismantle. The notes matter more than the prose.
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- These are teaching materials written by RCF English, not official answers, and not the only acceptable answers.
- Do not memorise them. At Advanced Level a memorised answer is unmistakable, and it will not fit the question you are set.
- The examples use an invented text, so that method can be demonstrated without reproducing a copyrighted work. Model answers on individual text pages refer to real prescribed texts.
- Nothing on this site invents a quotation, a critic or a textual fact.
Model 1 — An introduction
Question: "The father's pride is the cause of the family's destruction." How far do you agree?
The father's pride is the most visible cause of the family's destruction, and the novel invites us at first to accept that account of it. But the invitation is a trap, and the second half of the book withdraws it. What we are shown is a defence constructed in a particular emergency — the dismissal, the month of empty mornings — which survives the emergency and continues to operate when nothing threatens it any longer. The destruction is caused less by pride than by the persistence of a habit after its reason has gone; and it is the novel's refusal to let us settle on the simpler explanation that makes it more than a study of a difficult man.
Why this answer works
- It takes a position in the first clause, then complicates it in the second sentence. Four sentences, and the whole argument is visible.
- The invitation is a trap is a claim about the novel's method, not only about its content. Comments on how a text manages its reader are highly rewarded.
- Two pieces of evidence are already referred to precisely — the dismissal, the month of empty mornings — without a single quotation. Precise reference can do the work of quotation.
- The last clause states what is at stake in the reading, which gives the essay somewhere to arrive.
- There is no In this essay I shall, no biography, and no definition of pride.
Model 2 — A body paragraph
The clearest evidence for the conventional reading is the refusal scene, and it is worth putting the case at its strongest. When the son offers money, the father answers, "I have managed thirty years without it" — a reply which does not decline the offer so much as convert it into an occasion for measuring his own endurance. The precision of the figure is the telling detail: a man who has been counting has been rehearsing, and the reply arrives with the smoothness of something long prepared. The effect on the reader is discomfort rather than admiration, and the discomfort is directed at him. If the novel ended here, the proposition in the question would be unanswerable.
It does not end here, and the second half insists on the history behind that smoothness. We learn in the following chapter that the father, dismissed after twenty-two years, continued for a month to leave the house at his usual hour so that the neighbours should not know. The detail is given without comment, which is characteristic: the narrator declines to tell us how to take it. But its effect is to reframe every refusal that follows. A man who has walked out of his own door each morning into nothing has learnt that dignity must be manufactured daily, and the refusal of his son's money is the same manufacture, continued past the point of necessity.
Why this answer works
- The strongest version of the opposing case is put first, deliberately and fairly. An essay that only defeats a weak version of the counter-argument convinces nobody.
- If the novel ended here, the proposition would be unanswerable — this concedes fully, which makes the reversal that follows far more powerful.
- The reversal is structural, not merely another example: the argument turns on where in the novel the evidence appears.
- The detail is given without comment, which is characteristic — an observation about narrative technique, which is exactly the register of A/L analysis.
- Two short quotations in two substantial paragraphs. Quantity of quotation is never the measure.
- The final sentence performs the reframing rather than announcing it.
Model 3 — A conclusion
To say that pride destroys this family is therefore to repeat the judgement of the neighbours, who see the refusals and not the mornings. The novel has been careful to give the reader both, and the difference between what the neighbours know and what we know is the measure of what it is asking of us. Its subject is not a fault of character but the afterlife of an injury: the way a defence outlasts the danger, and goes on defending against people who were never the threat. The father is at once the author of his family's unhappiness and its longest sufferer, and the novel declines, rightly, to resolve that into a verdict.
Why this answer works
- It judges. It does not summarise the paragraphs; it decides what the essay has established.
- It returns to the question's proposition and gives a precise account of what is wrong with it.
- The difference between what the neighbours know and what we know is a comment on the reader's position — a genuinely critical observation, arrived at rather than asserted.
- The final clause holds a tension open instead of collapsing it. At A/L, refusing a false resolution is a strength, provided the refusal is argued.
- No new evidence is introduced. Everything here has been earned by the body of the essay.