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GATE 2021 XH2 – Question 58

Literary Forms, Genres, and Modes of Expression · Aesthetic and Rhetorical Strategies: Narrative and poetic techniques, and figures of speech · 2 marks · Multiple select

Prolepsis represents or anticipates a future act from a narrative’s present. Which passages contain it?

  1. In Atonement,a narrator says that six decades later she would describe writing through literary history at thirteen.
  2. In Hamlet,Horatio hears “I am dead” from the still-speaking Hamlet.
  3. In The Great Gatsby,the narrator recalls advice from his father in younger years.
  4. One Hundred Years of Solitude opens by anticipating Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad years later and remembering childhood ice.

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Show answer and explanation

Correct answer: (A) In Atonement,a narrator says that six decades later she would describe writing through literary history at thirteen.; (B) In Hamlet,Horatio hears “I am dead” from the still-speaking Hamlet.; (D) One Hundred Years of Solitude opens by anticipating Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad years later and remembering childhood ice.

Explanation

A projects to an event six decades later; B anticipates the speaker’s imminent death as already accomplished; D projects forward to the firing squad. All are proleptic uses, A,B,D. C instead looks backward from the telling present, an analeptic recollection rather than a forward anticipation.

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