"It Is The Tragedy..."

Joyce Cary, a British author who was born in 1888 and died in 1957 said “It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know – and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.”

And how true is Joyce Cary…

At the first glimpse of the instruction “…1 section and 1 question…” I knew without having to look into the question, it would be going to be a long dreaded two hours of my life in the examination hall. There I was, regretting every moment of not reading seriously of the essay by George Orwell before the examination, merely scanning through. I was so focused on understanding the literary criticism and it did not occur to me how important to not only read all the essays in the module but to know at least at a very minimal level the background of the authors. Oh my God, I was panicking and who is George Orwell? And I seriously read E.M Forster “Two Cheers for Democracy”.

Well I was left with no choice but to give the best shot I could in my own ways. As a consolation, to begin with, before I started reading the essay I told myself, I knew the basis of criticism: Deconstruction, Reader-Response, Archetype, Feminism, Psychoanalytical, and Marxist. I should be focusing myself to one of those criticisms in writing my thesis statement and thus my writing through out.

Once decided, all that I wanted to write was the instability in thinking between the character and his judgements on having to shoot the elephant. I would love to explore the mind of the character between his repressed memory and the racial memory of the collective unconscious. The setback was I did not read the essay before the examination and wasted too much time reading and mentally responding to the essay during the examination instead of writing my answer. My own repressed memories were way too much for me to handle within that time limitation.

Well, since I could not get what I would like to write within those 2 hours, then I would have to like what I will be getting from Dr Edwin of my answer to his question.