Oroonoko

Guidance notes

In preparing your answer, you should read Oroonoko along with the teaching material in Chapter 5 of The Renaissance and Long Eighteenth Century. You should also listen to the four audio recordings for Part 2, consult the section ‘Textual analysis’ in the Assessment Guide and complete the relevant sections of the online ‘Skills tutorial: prose’.

The question requires you to undertake close analysis of the passage, focusing on (1) narrative techniques and (2) distinctive features of language, and to discuss how the passage is informed by context. As there are several different requirements for this assignment, it is important that you plan your essay carefully before you start writing, in order to ensure that you address all of them. Think carefully about the order in which you choose to discuss the three different areas. You may want to start with narrative techniques and then move on to the distinctive features of the language and the relevant contexts, or you may feel that it makes more sense to begin by looking at the contexts of the extract. Let the passage under examination be your guide here.

When discussing the narrative techniques, you should consider such questions as: what is the identity of the narrator? What are the effects of the chosen narrative voice? Is it a first- or third-person narrator? From whose point of view does the narrator tell the story? Think as well about how speech and thought are presented. What is the tone of the passage? Is there an argument implicit in the narrative? Sections 1 and 2 of the ‘Skills tutorial: prose’ will help you with these questions on narrators and the effects of the narrative voice, so begin your preparation by working through these sections.

When considering the distinctive features of the language, you should spend time locating any literary devices (e.g., imagery, repetition, rhetoric) and considering what effects are produced by these. How do they contribute to the meaning of the passage? How are characters depicted? Section 3 of the ‘Skills tutorial: prose’ (Characterisation) and Section 3 of the ‘Skills tutorial: poetry’ (Figurative language) will be helpful for considering these questions.

You will also need to consider what a knowledge of context adds to your understanding of the text, so you will need to decide which contexts suggest themselves here and what role they have in aiding and illuminating your interpretation of the passage. Pacheco discusses some of the contexts of Oroonoko in Chapter 5 of The Renaissance and Long Eighteenth Century, so read through the sections of the chapter carefully when preparing your assignment, identifying which of the contexts considered are relevant for the passage under consideration. You are being asked to provide evidence of how context adds to our understanding of this particular extract, so try to avoid writing in general terms.