Tony: A short story is little more than a novelist's sketch pad. Only novels have narrative structures that allow wr...
Motunrayo-Bamgbose-MartinsAugust 20, 2020
why is A a better choice than C?
In A, Tony never references human lives not being a series of completely disjointed vignettes? So, how is it that he would disagree with something he did not mention?
In C, How is there no reason to believe that Raoul does not disagree with the statement since he explicitly mentions that life is not of a linear process of personality development
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Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what these two are saying first. Tony tells us that short stories are like sketch pads for novelists. Only novels have narrative structures that let writers depict human lives accurately by letting the characters’ personalities gradually develop through life experience.
Raoul then says that life isn’t about a linear personality development; instead, it’s a bunch of disjointed vignettes, and from those the observer can see character. So Raoul concludes that the short story depicts human lives more faithfully than the novel does.
Now we’re asked for what Tony and Raoul disagree about. For these kinds of questions, we want to definitively say that one of them will disagree with the statement, and the other one will agree. So let’s take a look at (C) first. Would they disagree on the statement that novels usually depict gradual changes in characters’ personalities? What would Tony say? Well, Tony just says that novels can do this, not that they usually do it, so we don’t know. And that’s enough to cast out this answer choice, since if we don’t know, we can’t say they agree or disagree. But, for the record, Raoul doesn’t mention anything about what novels usually do, so we also don’t know what he thinks. So we don’t know what either of them says about this, and so (C) is wrong.
Now take a look at (A), which tells us that they’d disagree about whether human lives are best understood as series of completely disjointed vignettes. Well, what does Tony say about this? Tony would disagree with this, since Tony thinks that only novels can depict human lives, and novels don’t use a series of completely disjointed vignettes to do this from what we’re told in the passage. What would Raoul say about this? Raoul would agree with this, and that comes directly out of his first sentence. Raoul agrees, and Tony disagrees, so this is what they’d disagree on.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
