Unseen Prose Model Answer

What follows is a model response to an Unseen Prose question. Specifically, the question relates to the AQA English Literature A Level, Paper 2A: Texts in Shared Contexts (WW1 and its aftermath), and is worded as follows:

Explore the significance of sacrifice in this extract. [25 marks]

For clarity, the extract is taken from a 2014 novel called Wake by the author Anna Hope. It follows a mother, Ada, as she recalls the last time she saw her son, before his departure as a soldier to France. The extract has not been replicated here, due to copyright restrictions, but is accessible online if you know where to look!

After the essay, you will be able to find an examiner commentary on how it achieved its allocated marks. 

The earth-shifting suddenness of post-1916 conscription during the first World War, and the sacrifice associated with it, is distilled into prose throughout this extract, with the disconcertingly uneven progression of time, the rapidly vacillating emotions expressed both in dialogue and the mother’s interiority, and the failures of religion to provide explanation or comfort. In short, the sacrifices of war are characterised as both all-encompassing and obligatory, and yet starkly pointless.

The first sacrifice that is made is that of agency – agency of soldier child, of mother, even of reader. Beginning the extract mid-conversation reflects the railing against freedom that was the 1916 Military Service Act. There is no contextualising of the son’s disgust at the implied mention of safety for soldiers, only the italicisation and the speech tag “[he] spat” to lend his rhetorical question, “‘Safe?’”, a bitterness that hints at conflict. Audience expectation is thus subverted from the very first sentence with the lack of orientation, and it is subverted once more when conflict does not follow. Instead, the narrative lurches forward in time, three times in quick succession after the opening conversation that presumably takes place in the wake of the aforementioned Act in 1916: “autumn came”, “the first week of March”, and “when he had finished his training”. This unceremonious jolting of the timeline towards departure reflects the powerlessness of waiting that is a common theme in wartime stories focusing on mothers (and fiancées, wives, parents, children, friends) left behind, and also serving to disconcert and destabilise the reader’s sense of movement. The first sacrifice has been made, as involuntarily as the military recruitment, in the loss of control over these characters’ lives.

The next sacrifice that the mother demonstrably makes in this extract is her voice. She contains her extreme emotions throughout – commencing with the silence she opts for in response to her son’s bitterness at the start (she “went inside, sat down and held her shaking hands in her lap”) and culminating with the equally silent “star[ing] at the number” on his tag at the end. These verbs, “went”, “sat”, “held”, “stared”, are all passive and nonverbal. The dialogue, in contrast, is incongruously light, with consistently ellipted and clipped expression – “Might be”, “They teach you [...], then?” – and sparse direct questioning (“What’s that? [...] Can I see?”) which is forever at odds with the interior turmoil we are granted access to via the free indirect discourse Hope deploys. Inside, Ada is “selfish[...], frantic[...]” as she silently prays, later reflecting poetically on the “soft, changing shapes of [Michael’s] boyhood”, and then staring aghast at his reduction to a number: truncated, fragment sentences akin to a fluttering heartbeat, “Six digits. [...] Her son.” It is not that she is lacking in emotion, but rather that she is suppressing it for the sake of her son’s fortitude – a theme with a lengthy precedent in wartime literature, perhaps best expressed in Barker’s Regeneration, when it is observed that soldiers resist fully disclosing the horrors of war to “their women” not merely to avoid “worry[ing] them” but also because they “needed her ignorance to hide in”. Soldiers might only keep it together if the elephants in the room remain unaddressed. This sacrifice is slightly more voluntary than the sacrifice of freedoms, but is nevertheless heavily precipitated by the external force: the “hungry war”.

Sacrifice is rendered biblical in this extract. The mother makes vague reference to the “Bible [...] stories she remembered from childhood” wherein “all the boys [must] be killed” as per “an order” from on high – likely a nod to Exodus 1, or to Herod, or maybe to Isaac in Genesis – before jarringly praying to a God, “selfishly, frantically”, whose power she doubts next to the “hungry war itself, growling just beyond the gates”. The Christian God and Bible are invoked not to be figures of salvation or comfort, but instead to be condemned as either tyrannical (kill “all the boys”) or negligent (“distant [...] may not be listening”) – or at best ineffectual – showing the abject failure of religion to manage the diabolical existence of citizens in this context. Wilfred Owen’s famous line from Exposure comes to mind – “love of God seems dying” – and this predates the conscription in this story as the mother “hadn’t [prayed] in years”. Crucially, sacrifice of this biblical variety is characterised as random and brutal, without cause and without consent, which is a fundamental conceptualisation of what sacrifice represents in the wartime context.

This essay is very strong. There is a clear line of argument running throughout, underpinned by extensive textual references. The analysis at text-, sentence-, and word-level is very strong, with apt deployment of linguistic and literary terminology as appropriate. Contextual knowledge is secure, and the candidate thoroughly engages with historical details and intertextuality to recognise patterns in wartime stories. The final paragraph is weaker, representing a lack of time to finish with clarity, somewhat harming AO1 and AO5, but this does not detract from the overall performance across assessment objectives which exceeds the required standard for A-Level.