Examkin

Question

Difficulty: EasyUnreliable Narrators and Perspective Bias

Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer:

It is a matter of documented historical record—or it would be, had the town council not been compromised by the descendants of the grocer Silas Vance—that my great-grandfather single-handedly saved the valley from the flood of 1888. The official archives, written by men of notoriously weak constitution and even weaker prose, claim that a communal effort of forty citizens secured the southern levee. This is patently absurd. Forty men could not possibly align their efforts without a singular, guiding intellect, and my great-grandfather’s journals clearly note that he spent the entire night of the storm shouting directions from his dry porch. That the town chose to honor the laborers who merely piled the sandbags, rather than the visionary who pointed where they should go, is a testament to the persistent jealousy that has dogged my family for generations. Even now, as I walk down the avenue that should bear our name but instead honors a common blacksmith, I am struck by the town’s collective amnesia. They call it 'civic history,' but it is nothing more than a conspiracy of the mediocre to erase the exceptional.

The narrator's account of the town's history primarily reveals which of the following about his perspective?

  1. A
    He is the only objective chronicler in a town that has systematically erased its true history.
  2. B
    The author is exposing the corrupt political motives of the town council.
  3. His deep-seated family pride distorts his interpretation of communal historical events.Answer
  4. D
    The town archives are factually incorrect because they were written by uneducated laborers.
  5. E
    The townspeople have waged a malicious campaign of jealousy to ruin the narrator's family name.

Answer

His deep-seated family pride distorts his interpretation of communal historical events.
The correct answer is the option stating that the narrator's family pride distorts his interpretation of communal events. The narrator's bias is evident in how he devalues the physical labor of forty citizens and insists that his great-grandfather's verbal directions from a dry porch were the sole reason the valley was saved. His resentment over street names and archives further highlights that his family ego shapes his distorted view of the town's history.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the narrator's claims and tone in the passage.
The narrator claims his great-grandfather single-handedly saved the valley by shouting directions, and he expresses deep resentment about the town naming streets after common laborers instead of his family.
Identifying the narrator's tone and primary focus helps establish the source of their subjective bias.
2
Contrast the narrator's claims with the documented communal efforts mentioned in the text.
The official history records forty citizens working together to build a levee, which the narrator dismisses as 'patently absurd' simply because his family member was not credited as the sole leader.
Contrasting the narrator's version with the communal version highlights the narrator's unreliability and perspective bias.
3
Evaluate the choices to find the one that correctly identifies the narrator's bias without validating his claims.
The choice stating that his family pride distorts his interpretation of communal history accurately captures how his personal bias leads him to reject the cooperative reality of the event.
This confirms the correct option based on literary analysis of narrator reliability.

Key Concept

Unreliable Narrators and Perspective Bias
Rate this question

Topics

Unreliable Narrators and Perspective Bias

More questions from this topic