GRE Reading Comprehension

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Source: NO3

Notable as important nineteenth-century novels by women, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights treat women very differently. Shelley produced a "masculine text in which the fates of subordinate female characters seem entirely dependent on the actions of male heroes or anti-heroes. Bronte produced a more realistic narrative portraying a world where men battle for the favors of apparently high-spirited, independent women. Nevertheless, these two novels are alike in several crucial ways. Many readers are convinced that the compelling mysteries of each plot conceal elaborate structures of allusion and fierce, though shadowy, moral ambitions that seem to indicate metaphysical intentions, though efforts by critics to articulate these intentions have generated much controversy. Both novelists use a storytelling method that emphasizes ironic disjunctions between different perspectives on the same events as well as ironic tensions that inhere in the relationship between surface drama and concealed authorial intention, a method I call an evidentiary narrative technique.

Question List: 1 2 3 4

Which of the following narrative strategies best exemplifies the "evidentiary narrative technique" mentioned in line 31-32?

  • A Telling a story in such a way that the author's real intentions are discernible only through interpretations of allusions to a world outside that of the story.
  • B Telling a story in such a way that the reader is aware as events unfold of the author's underlying purposes and the ways these purposes conflict with the drama of the plot
  • C Telling a story in a way that both directs attention to the incongruities among the points of view of several characters and hints that the plot has a significance other than that suggested by its mere events
  • D Telling a story as a mystery in which the reader must deduce, from the conflicting evidence presented by several narrators, the moral and philosophical significance of character and event
  • E Telling a story from the author's point of view in a way that implies both the author's and the reader's ironic distance from the dramatic unfolding of events

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