Page 123 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

122 How to write critical essays
protest will sound shrewd rather than shrill. His metaphor of
the failed duellist resorting to blunt thuggery will illuminatingly
encapsulate your own suspicions.
Convincing criticism often reflects the tone of the work’s
own verbal texture. A short essay about a long work needs to
be particularly wary of sounding too hasty in its judgements.
Here is an example from an essay on a complex, ruminative
novel about the interaction between distinct social, religious
and racial groups:

In A Passage to India, E.M.Forster deals with the offence
which is caused by associating individuals with stereotypes.
Adela Quested, brought up in England as a Christian, asks
the Indian, Doctor Aziz (who believes in Islam), how many
wives he has. In this case Aziz should not have felt insulted.
His fault is being too sensitive and too ready to put a wrong
interpretation on comments offered innocently by someone
who means no harm.

The terminology here—‘offence’, ‘should not’, ‘wrong’,
‘innocently’, ‘means no harm’—sounds too decisively
moralistic. The reader may feel distanced from the text’s own
tentatively balanced exploration of mixed motive and multiple
responsibility.
Obviously an essay must be more economical in style than
the longer texts which it describes. However, your brevity need
not create a more dogmatic tone than the text has itself chosen.
Here is a more appropriately cautious treatment of the same
novel:
Forster may explore the damage caused by people who
pigeon-hole each other as stereotypes. Adela’s curiosity
about polygamists does make Aziz fear that she is less
interested in him. Yet, even here, Forster’s wide-ranging
sympathy will not allocate simplistic blame. Adela may be
being unimaginative and Aziz hypersensitive but both are
victims of forces as impersonally vast as the subcontinent
itself.
This last sentence perhaps offers such a grandiose assertion that
it should immediately be followed by a quotation from the
novel. Loyalty to the text’s tone cannot long be sustained
without a verbatim example.