Page 86 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Making a detailed case 85
already inhabits and which she recognizes through the texts
that she reads.
So it seems perverse to complain that the prose of Rasselas
is too inflexible for characters to sound distinct and
developing. Where the characters claim most loudly that
their minds are open to future possibilities, the text’s
obtrusively consistent style insists that it—and all the
characters which it contains—must stay closed within its
present structures.

This long commentary suggests the kind of observation which
might be welcomed if you had been asked to write a critical
analysis of just one chapter in the novel. In an essay on
Johnson’s overall achievement it would almost certainly be
condemned as disproportionate.
You may often need to confine yourself to picking out just
one or two specifics. Yet, however few features of a quotation
you have time to mention, each must prove your willingness to
notice details and to think about their precise significance.
Here is an example of what seems to me a reasonably
proportionate amount of guidance on a quotation of average
length from The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel by Oliver
Goldsmith. The first sentence briefly establishes whereabouts in
the plot the text chooses to lodge the passage which is to be
quoted. The second gives broad warning of the extract’s intent
and tone:

Having reached their destination, Primrose and his family
once again go about setting up their ideal world of rustic
virtue. Their bliss is reflected by the fecundity of the land and
the beauty of their setting:
Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping
hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and a
prattling river before; on one side a meadow, on the other
a green. My farm consisted of about twenty acres of
excellent land. (chapter 4)
In this description, ‘sheltered’ is the operative word.
Primrose’s stronghold of domestic felicity is guarded by the
ramparts of a natural world—wood, river, meadow and
green. Yet the encroaching pressure of a more commercial
value-system can be seen in that accountant’s precision about