IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature – Reading and Writing about Prose Fiction and Drama Revision Notes

For full explanations and worked examples, start with the prose and drama study guide.

These revision notes condense reading and writing about prose fiction and drama for IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature, at SL and HL. They follow the current IB subject brief (first assessments for SL and HL 2021) and map to the areas of exploration Time and space and Intertextuality: connecting texts. These skills feed every assessed component: Paper 1, Paper 2, the individual oral and, at HL, the HL essay.

Course links: Language A: Literature hub · printable checklist · practice questions for this unit · assessment revision notes.

Key terms: prose fiction

Term	Meaning	What to say about it
Narrator	The voice that tells the story	What it knows, hides or judges
Focaliser	The character through whose eyes events are seen	How their view limits or colours events
First person	“I” narration by a character	Intimacy; bias; possible unreliability
Third-person limited	“He/she”, close to one mind	Sympathy with one character; gaps elsewhere
Third-person omniscient	Moves between minds, may comment	Authority; irony; wide view
Free indirect style	Character’s thoughts in the narrator’s sentence, without “she thought”	Blurs judgement: whose view is this?
Unreliable narrator	An account the reader learns to doubt	How the text signals doubt, and when
Analepsis	Flashback	What the past explains or reframes
Prolepsis	Flash-forward	Suspense, dread, a sense of fate
Scene / summary / ellipsis	Real-time telling / compressed telling / skipped time	What the writer lingers on or skips
Direct / indirect characterisation	Telling us / showing us through speech and action	What we infer and why
Frame narrative	A story told inside another story	Who listens, and how that filters it
Pathetic fallacy	Weather or nature mirroring feeling	Why the mirror matters here

Key terms: drama

Term	Meaning	What to say about it
Stage directions	Instructions for set, movement, tone	They are evidence, not background
Soliloquy	A character alone on stage speaks thoughts aloud	Private access for the audience only
Monologue	A long speech to other characters (or the audience)	Power, persuasion, loss of control
Aside	A brief remark others on stage do not hear	Complicity between character and audience
Dramatic irony	The audience knows more than a character	Tension, pity, comedy
Subtext	Meaning beneath the spoken words	What the pause or change of subject hides
Off-stage action	Events reported, heard or implied, not shown	Why the playwright withholds it
Props, set, lighting, sound	Physical elements of performance	Symbol, mood, focus of attention
Act / scene break	Structural division	Time jumps, shifts of place, peaks of tension

Method in steps: a prose extract

1. Perspective. Who narrates? Whose eyes? Mark any slide into free indirect style.
2. Time. Put the events in story order, then compare with the order of telling. Mark flashbacks, flash-forwards and changes of pace.
3. Setting. What does the place or weather do: mirror, contrast or pressure?
4. Character. List what is shown rather than told. Choose the most revealing detail.
5. Structure. Look hard at the first and last sentences and any short paragraph that stands alone.
6. Thesis. One sentence saying what the extract does and how.

Method in steps: a drama extract

1. Stage picture. Read every stage direction first. Who is on stage? What can the audience see?
2. Power in dialogue. Who speaks most, who interrupts, who asks and who answers?
3. Silence and subtext. Mark every pause, dash and unfinished line. Say what it hides.
4. Conventions. Is there a soliloquy, aside or dramatic irony? What does the audience know that a character does not?
5. Sound, light and objects. Identify one prop or effect that carries symbolic weight.
6. Thesis. Tie staging and dialogue together in one claim about the scene.

Must-know distinctions

• Author vs narrator. Austen writes Pride and Prejudice (1813); the ironic narrator opens it with “It is a truth universally acknowledged”. The irony belongs to the narrative voice, and the rest of the novel tests the “truth” it states.
• Narrator vs focaliser. In a third-person limited novel, the narrator tells but a character sees. Getting this right is the basis of any comment on bias.
• Story vs telling. The story is what happened; the telling is the order and speed of the text. Retelling the story earns little. Analysing the telling earns credit.
• Soliloquy vs monologue vs aside. Alone and thinking; talking at length to others; a quick line others do not hear.
• Dialogue in prose vs dialogue in drama. In a novel, a tag such as “she said coldly” tells you how a line sounds. In a play, the actor and director decide unless a stage direction specifies, so the same words can be performed in several ways. Say so when it matters.
• In-text setting vs context. Setting is a craft choice inside the work. The Time and space area of exploration asks about the contexts in which a work was written and is received. Keep the two apart in your writing.
• Direct vs indirect characterisation. Being told a character is cruel is weaker evidence than watching them act cruelly.

Small worked reminders

Frame narrative. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is told by an unnamed narrator who reports Marlow’s story. You therefore receive Marlow’s account second-hand, through a listener on a boat, and the frame reminds you that every account is shaped by who tells it and who hears it.

Pace. Original text written for Marlbridge: “The war took four years. The walk from the station to her door took eleven minutes, and he remembered every one.” Four years pass in one short sentence (summary); eleven minutes get a whole clause and “every one” (scene). The imbalance shows what matters to the character.

Off-stage sound. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Nora’s departure is marked by the sound of a door slamming off stage. The audience is left alone with Torvald and the noise; the play refuses a final speech.

Props. In Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), a broken birdcage becomes evidence. The men miss its meaning; the women and the audience do not. A prop shifts the audience’s sympathy.

Linking to the areas of exploration

• Time and space. Ask how a work’s time and place of writing shape its form. A play written for a particular kind of stage, or a novel first read in instalments, carries traces of that context. Treat context as evidence for a reading, not a biography paragraph.
• Intertextuality. Prose and drama handle the same concerns by different means. A novel can state a thought; a play must stage it. Comparing those means gives a Paper 2 essay real comparative content. See the intertextuality revision notes and the readers, writers and texts revision notes.

Paragraph formula

Claim → embedded evidence → technique → effect → link to the whole work. One point, fully developed, beats three techniques named in a list.

Quick self-test

1. What is the difference between a narrator and a focaliser?
2. Name the technique: “She would not cry. Not here, not in front of him.” (third-person novel)
3. A chapter opens: “Years later, she would remember this as the last happy evening.” Name the technique and one effect.
4. What is the difference between a scene and a summary in prose?
5. Give one reason a writer might use a frame narrative.
6. What is the difference between a soliloquy and an aside?
7. A character says “I’m fine” while the stage direction reads (she grips the chair). What term describes the gap, and what should you write about it?
8. Why might a playwright keep a key event off stage?
9. Which area of exploration covers the context in which a work was written and received?
10. In a Paper 2 essay comparing a novel and a play, what makes a stronger comparison than “both show grief”?

Answers

1. The narrator tells the story; the focaliser is the character whose perception shapes what is seen. They can differ in third-person limited narration.
2. Free indirect style: the character’s thoughts in the narrator’s sentence, with no “she thought”.
3. Prolepsis (flash-forward). It creates dread or poignancy, since the reader knows the happiness will end before the character does.
4. A scene tells events at roughly real-time speed with detail; a summary compresses a long period into a few words.
5. Any one: it filters the story through a listener or teller whose reliability you must weigh; it creates distance in time; it lets several accounts sit side by side.
6. A soliloquy is spoken by a character alone on stage; an aside is a short remark that other characters on stage do not hear.
7. Subtext (or dramatic contrast between words and action). Explain what the gesture reveals that the words deny, and how an audience reads the contradiction.
8. Any one: to create suspense; to focus on reactions rather than the event; to keep violence or spectacle in the audience’s imagination; practical limits of the stage.
9. Time and space.
10. Comparing methods: how each form presents the grief (narration of thought vs silence and staging), and what each method lets the reader or audience understand.

Where marks are usually lost

• Retelling the plot instead of analysing the order and pace of the telling.
• Calling a narrator “omniscient” when the text never leaves one character’s mind.
• Treating the narrator’s opinions as the author’s.
• Ignoring stage directions, or quoting them without saying what they show an audience.
• Writing “this creates tension” without naming what on stage or on the page creates it.
• Naming pathetic fallacy for every change in weather without explaining what the link adds.
• Dropping long quotations in without comment instead of embedding a few precise words.
• Writing a context paragraph that never connects to a technique or an effect.
• In comparison, discussing the novel and the play in two separate blocks with no linking point.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief, Language A: literature, first assessments for SL and HL 2021 (2019).