IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature – Reading and Writing about Prose Fiction and Drama Study Guide

This study guide teaches you how to read and write about prose fiction and drama for IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature, at SL and HL. It follows the current IB subject brief (first assessments for SL and HL 2021). It maps to the areas of exploration Time and space and Intertextuality: connecting texts, and it covers narrative perspective, characterisation, time, setting and structure in prose, then dramatic conventions, staging and dialogue in drama.

Course links: Language A: Literature hub · printable checklist. This unit: study guide (this page) · revision notes · practice questions. For the course as a whole, see the syllabus guide and the subject guide.

What this unit covers

Area	What you must be able to do	SL/HL
Narrative perspective	Identify who tells the story and through whose eyes, and explain what that allows and hides	SL and HL
Characterisation	Show how a character is built through speech, action, description and other characters’ reactions	SL and HL
Time	Separate the order of events from the order of telling; comment on pace, flashback and flash-forward	SL and HL
Setting	Explain how place and atmosphere shape mood, character and meaning	SL and HL
Structure	Analyse openings, endings, framing and the placing of key moments	SL and HL
Dramatic conventions	Explain soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony and act/scene structure as choices for an audience	SL and HL
Staging	Read stage directions, set, props, sound and lighting as meaning, not decoration	SL and HL
Dialogue	Analyse turn-taking, interruption, pause, repetition and subtext	SL and HL

Where this is assessed

The brief lists four assessed components. Paper 1 is a guided analysis of unseen literary passages “from different text types” (1.25 hours at SL, 2.25 hours at HL; 35% at both levels), so you need a method that works on a prose extract or a scene from a play. Paper 2 is a comparative essay on two literary works, answering one of four questions (1.75 hours; 35% SL, 25% HL). The HL essay is a 1,200–1,500-word essay on one work studied (20%, HL only). The individual oral pairs a work originally written in the language studied with a work studied in translation, around a common global issue (30% SL, 20% HL). Your teacher will share the assessment criteria for each. For timing and exam technique, use the exam preparation guide.

Prose fiction

Narrative perspective

Start every prose analysis with two questions: who is telling (the narrator) and whose eyes are we seeing through (the focaliser). They are not always the same person.

• First-person narration gives one character’s voice and limits you to what they know or admit.
• Third-person limited narration stays close to one character’s thoughts.
• Third-person omniscient narration can move between minds and comment on events.
• Free indirect style blends the narrator’s voice with a character’s thoughts without “she thought”. Jane Austen uses it throughout Emma (1815).
• An unreliable narrator gives an account the reader learns to question.

Retrospective first-person narration adds a gap between the older narrator and the younger self. Charles Dickens opens Great Expectations (1861) like this:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

In “my infant tongue” the adult speaks about the child. The formal sentence belongs to a grown man; the name it arrives at, “Pip”, belongs to a small boy. From the first line you read two versions of one person, which lets the adult judge his younger self.

Characterisation

Writers build characters in two ways. Direct characterisation tells you (“She was proud”). Indirect characterisation shows you, through speech, action, appearance and how others react. Indirect methods make you infer, so they give you more to analyse.

E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) introduced the terms flat (built round a single idea, does not change) and round (capable of surprising the reader). “This character is round” is description. “Her late change makes us re-read her earlier coldness as fear” is analysis.

Time

Every narrative has two timelines: the story (events in the order they happened) and the telling (the order and speed in which the text presents them).

• Analepsis (flashback) moves back in time.
• Prolepsis (flash-forward) moves ahead, often creating suspense or a sense of fate.
• Pace: a scene gives events at roughly the speed they happen; a summary covers a long period in a sentence; an ellipsis skips time completely.

Always ask why the writer tells events in this order.

Setting

Setting covers place, time of day, season, weather and social world. It can mirror a character’s state, contrast with it, or act almost as a character itself. Thomas Hardy gives the whole first chapter of The Return of the Native (1878) to Egdon Heath before any person appears, so the landscape is established as a lasting force against which the characters’ plans look small. Pathetic fallacy (weather reflecting human feeling) is one tool; explain what the link adds.

Keep two ideas apart. Time and setting inside the text are craft choices. The Time and space area of exploration is about the contexts in which a work was written and is read. Both matter, but they answer different questions.

Structure

Look at openings, endings, chapter breaks and framing. A frame narrative places one story inside another. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) nests Victor’s story, and the creature’s story inside it, within Walton’s letters, so each account reaches you through a listener who may not be neutral. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) works in a similar way through Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Endings can be closed (resolved) or open (left uncertain).

Worked example: prose

Original text written for Marlbridge

The bus was late again, and Leo counted the puddles. Eleven. His mother would say he should have walked. His mother would say a great many things, later, when she saw the letter in his bag. For now there were only the puddles, and the lit windows of the bakery opposite, and the long, cold minute before the bus turned the corner.

Step 1 – perspective. Third-person limited, focalised through Leo. “His mother would say he should have walked” is free indirect style: Leo’s own anticipation of her voice, not the narrator’s judgement.

Step 2 – time. “Later, when she saw the letter in his bag” is a prolepsis. It tells you trouble is coming but not what the letter says, so a dull wait becomes tense.

Step 3 – setting. Cold puddles against “the lit windows of the bakery opposite” set Leo outside warmth he cannot reach, a quiet image of his isolation.

Step 4 – pace and structure. “Eleven.” is a one-word sentence: time moves slowly enough to count puddles. “The long, cold minute” stretches sixty seconds, and the list joined by “and … and” slows the reading to match his dread.

Step 5 – thesis. The writer turns an ordinary wait into suspense by letting a flash-forward hang over a slowed-down present, so the reader shares Leo’s dread before learning its cause.

Drama

Reading a play as a script

A play is written to be performed, so imagine it on stage: who is visible, and what the audience can see that a character cannot. Stage directions are part of the text, and so are silences. Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) builds its meaning through props: two women notice domestic details, such as a broken birdcage, that the men searching the house dismiss, and the audience watches the truth assembled from “trifles”.

Dramatic conventions

• Soliloquy: a character alone on stage speaks their thoughts. The audience gets private access no other character has, as in Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech.
• Aside: a brief remark to the audience or to one character, unheard by the others.
• Dramatic irony: the audience knows what a character does not.
• Act and scene structure: breaks control time jumps, location changes and where tension peaks.
• Off-stage action: events reported rather than shown. What a playwright keeps off stage can matter as much as what is shown.

Staging

Set, props, costume, lighting, sound and exits all carry meaning. At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Nora leaves and the audience hears the door slam behind her: an off-stage sound closes the play. Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904) ends with the distant sound of an axe striking the trees of the orchard. In both, the audience is left with a sound rather than a speech.

Dialogue

Dialogue moves the plot and reveals character. Look at who speaks most, who interrupts, who changes the subject, and what is not said (subtext). Short alternating lines raise tension; a long speech can show power or loss of control. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) gives Lady Bracknell this line:

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

The balanced structure (one parent / both; misfortune / carelessness) sounds like reasoned judgement, but its logic is absurd. The gap between confident form and ridiculous content shows a character who treats propriety as more real than grief.

Worked example: drama

Original text written for Marlbridge

A kitchen. Night. A single lamp on the table. MARGARET, sixties, sits with an unopened envelope. Her son RAY enters, car keys still in his hand.

RAY: You rang. MARGARET: I did. RAY: At midnight, Mum. MARGARET: (sliding the envelope across the table) It came this morning. (RAY does not pick it up.)

Staging. One lamp isolates the two figures. The unopened envelope draws every eye. The keys in Ray’s hand suggest he means to leave soon.

Dialogue. The lines are short and clipped. “You rang.” / “I did.” gives nothing away; the tension lies in what neither says.

Convention. The audience does not know what is in the envelope either, so suspense is shared with Ray.

Action as meaning. The final stage direction is a refusal. Ray does not pick it up, so a non-action ends the scene, and the actor’s stillness carries the moment.

Thesis. The playwright creates tension through what is withheld: an unopened letter, an unexplained phone call and a son who will not touch either.

Comparing prose and drama

Intertextuality is partly about how the same concern changes across forms. A novel can enter a mind directly through narration; a play must find another route, such as a soliloquy, an aside, a prop or a silence. In a Paper 2 comparison of a novel and a play, this difference in method is often your strongest point: show what each reader or audience gains or loses. The intertextuality study guide covers echo, response and subversion; the readers, writers and texts guide covers how readers construct meaning.

Writing about prose and drama

Use a four-part pattern in each analytical point:

1. Claim linked to the question.
2. Evidence: a short quotation embedded in your sentence, or a precise stage direction.
3. Technique named accurately.
4. Effect: what the choice does to the reader or audience, and why it matters for the whole text.

Common errors

• Confusing the narrator with the author, or a soliloquy’s speaker with the playwright.
• Calling any third-person narrator “omniscient” when it enters only one mind.
• Retelling the plot instead of analysing the order in which it is told.
• Treating stage directions as background instead of evidence.
• Writing “the audience feels tension” without saying what on stage creates it.
• Mixing up in-text setting with the context of production.

Next steps

Condense this unit with the revision notes, then test yourself with the practice questions. For assessment detail, see the assessment revision notes.

Official syllabus

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