A Level English Literature - the Immigration Experience Delivery Guide Learner Resources - Voice

Content Activity 2

Voice

Student guidance

Task 1

In this task you will look at how John Updike shifts between a neutral authorial voice and Ahmad’s voice. This hits AO2 – how writers shape meanings and/or AO1 – informed interpretations.

Read the opening pages (Pages 3 to 7) of Terrorist by John Updike with your teacher. Discuss as a class the techniques Updike uses to create Ahmad’s voice.

Next split into pairs. Look at pages 7 to 11 in your pairs. Pick out sentences that are written in the author’s ‘neutral’ voice and write these in the first column of the table below. Next compare them with quotations from pages 3 -7 that are written in Ahmad’s voice. There are some examples in the table below to help you get started.

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The Immigration Experience

Authorial voice (7-11) / Comparison with Ahmad’s voice (3-7) / Analysis /
The halls of the high school smell of perfume and bodily exhalations, of chewing gum, and impure cafeteria food, / A noisy varnished hall lined with metal lockers and having at its end a blank wall desecrated by grafitti and roller-painted over so often it feels to be coming closer by millimetres / No adjectives used to describe the hall – more unbiased and informative; ‘impure’ could have connotations of religious impurity so there is a rumble of Ahmad’s voice in this line – and his voice will break through later in this section. The blank wall is desecrated, this is a hyperbolic way of describing the grafitti. The wall is not a religious artefact so the walls haven’t been desecrated. The idea of the walls closing in is Ahmad’s subjective, claustrophobic view of the school filtering into the description.
… and of cloth – cotton and wool the synthetic materials of running shoes, warmed by young flesh (7)
…triumphant, jeering racket of departure (8)
…an endearing self-confidence… (8)

Task 2

Student guidance

In this task, you’ll use the skills you’ve been using in Task 1, and apply them to The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

In pairs, discuss the ways that the voice in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is different to the voices in John Updike’s Terrorist. Feedback to the class.

Next write the different characteristics of the voice in The Reluctant Fundamentalist that you have identified in the first column; next, find quotations that exemplify this characteristic and put these in the second column. In the final column use technical terms and concepts to analyse the techniques that Hamid uses to create these characteristics (AO1).

Characteristic / Quotation / Technique
Polite / Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? (1) / ‘May’ is the politest modal form. Erica is amused by how polite Changez is. In hindsight, if Changez is an assassin then this polite tone is ironic, and unsettling. If he is to be assassinated, it is poignant.
Formal

The Immigration Experience

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