2024 WAEC GCE FIRST SERIES (JANUARY) LITERATURE: 2024 WAEC GCE First Series LITERATURE QUESTIONS and ANSWERS (2759)

(1)

The relationship between Boy and Adah is very strong. He is there, at the wharf, to bid farewell to Adah on her dream journey to the United Kingdom. In fact, Boy happens to be the only one to cry when The Oriel , the boat on which his sister is travelling to the United Kingdom, takes off. It was then that she saw her brother, Boy, in a brown African robe that was too big for him, crying and wiping his eyes with a velvet hat. In the same manner, Adah cries for Boy, her only true relative she is now leaving behind. Her in-laws will not cry for her so she has decided not to cry for them.

Again, when Adah writes to tell him about the Family Planning Cap Incident, Boy instantly sends her all his savings. He asks her to leave Francis immediately and return to Nigeria assuring her that the American Consulate job will still be there waiting for her.

(2)

Francis is a married man and a father of four children. They are Titi, a girl, Vicky, a boy, Bubu, another boy, and Dada, a girl. By the end of the novel, he is on his way to becoming a father of five as Adah is carrying her fifth pregnancy at this time.

He first appears in the narrative at the time Adah is desperately looking for a way to become more independent of her own family. She wants to live on her own so she can pursue her dreams without being tied down by a marriage to an “old baldie”.

But, since as a teenager she is not allowed to live entirely on her own, she must get someone of her own choice to marry. Francis becomes the convenient choice.

To Adah at this stage, marriage to Francis is nothing more than a tool she must use to achieve her educational, career and United Kingdom dreams.

Similarly, Francis and his parents, on their part, see Adah, an educated girl with a bright future in front of her as an opportunity to better their financial circumstances. For both bride and groom, therefore, this is simply a marriage of convenience – at least at the beginning.

(4)

Nii took a part-time teaching job to ease the financial burden imposed on him by his wife's illness. He is in deficit at his workplace. Therefore, the need for another source of income to augment his earning. He is a perpetual latecomer because he walks down to the school to cut the cost.

However, his inability to manage his emotion when he arrived at the school on a fateful day landed him more humiliation from the students who were upset for his late-coming and had written some insulting words on the board. His attempt to teach despite their rude attitudes we're frustrated by the students that his response was not probably managed and landed him more humiliation. This, he pays for dearly loving and caring for his wife.

(5)

In the Epilogue, the narrator speaks to us from his underground hideout again. Having had time to reflect on his life, he has decided that reality exists in the mind.

The narrator considers coming out of hibernation and facing the world once again, reasoning that "even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play."

Resuming his reflections on the meaning of his life that he began in the Prologue, the narrator, having survived numerous traumatic experiences, including the madness of the Harlem riot, can now reflect on his life with a detached objectivity that he was unable to achieve before he realized that, through his imagination, he has the power to transform and transcend reality. He has also achieved a clarity of vision that enables him to see things from a different perspective.

After getting to know him on a more personal level as a unique individual instead of as a nameless, anonymous black man, the reasons behind his ramblings are understandable. Without this knowledge, labeling him "crazy" and simply discounting or dismissing his remarks would be the greater inclination. Recalling the narrator's initial encounter with the veterans at the Golden Day, in light of his own experiences he is likely to be more sympathetic and understanding of their situation at this point in his life than he was as a naïve young college student. Although the world around him has not changed significantly, the narrator's attitude toward life and 'copied from e x p o c o d e . n e t free' his perspective concerning normal versus abnormal behavior have changed dramatically, because he is now a veteran of the race war.

The narrator's remark regarding his "belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running" reveals his enhanced emotional maturity, as does his struggle to come to terms with the meaning of his grandfather's advice. Despite the torture he has been forced to endure, he is still stupidly alive, which suggests that living in a world that denies an individual basic human rights is a fate worse than death. He reiterates his stance, "I'm invisible, not blind."

The narrator's accidental meeting with Mr. Norton in the subway is key. Norton asks him for directions but doesn't recognize him as the young man he once identified as the keeper of his destiny. Given the narrator's life-long search for his true identity, the narrator's realisation, which he attempts to share with Mr. Norton, that "if you don't know where you are, you probably don't know who you are" means that unless an individual understands their place in history, they can never hope to discover their identity.

Concerning his reasons for writing down his story, the narrator realizes that the process of writing helped him work through the pain, diffuse the hate, and regain his capacity to love. Once more, he reflects on the experiences of his grandfather who, even as a slave, never doubted his humanity. In the final analysis, the narrator suggests that even though 'copied from e x p o c o d e . n e t free' his experiences as a black man in white America are unique, his experiences have much in common with the experiences of all human beings. He suggests that even though he speaks on his own behalf, perhaps on some level, he speaks for each of us.

Whether the narrator is seen as hero or victim depends on whether he is seen literally living underground or as metaphorically living in his subconscious  whether to believe that he is hibernating or whether to assume that he is merely hiding. In his essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," Ellison is quite emphatic about the meaning of the novel's closing scene. As he points out, the narrator's movement down into "a coal cellar, a source of heat, light, power" is not an act of "concealment in darkness"; it is "a process of rising to an understanding of his human condition."

(6)
Mr. Norton asks to be taken to his room and requests a personal visit from Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the college. Bledsoe becomes furious when the narrator informs him of the afternoon’s events, scolding him that he should have known to show powerful white trustees only what the college wants them to see. When Bledsoe arrives at Norton’s room, he orders the narrator to leave and instructs him to attend the chapel service that evening. In his room later that afternoon, the narrator receives a message that Bledsoe wants to speak with him in Norton’s room. He arrives to find only Mr. Norton, however, who informs him that Bledsoe had to leave suddenly but that the narrator can find him in his office after the evening service. Norton says that he explained to Bledsoe that the narrator was not responsible for what happened and adds that he thinks that Bledsoe understands.

(7)

Nelly is a patient, responsible, and resourceful woman who is most often found caring for others; she describes herself to Lockwood as “a steady, reasonable kind of body.” Nelly begins her lifetime role as a caretaker when she is young. For example, when Hindley, Heathcliff, and Cathy fall ill with the measles, “I had to tend them, and take on me the cares of a woman.” She later cares for Hareton, describing him as her “first bonny little nurseling,” and is also a surrogate mother for Cathy Linton. In a novel in which biological parents are often either indifferent or destructive towards their children, Nelly offers a model of a caring and nurturing presence. She can, however, go too far in her interventions, as when she gives in to Catherine’s pleas to go and visit Linton after Heathcliff tells them that his son is dying of a broken heart. Since this visit indirectly leads to Cathy’s unhappy marriage to Linton, Nelly might have been a better guardian if she had stood her ground.