PrepTest 113, Section 1, Question 17
Published in 1952, Invisible Man featured a protagonist(439 more words not shown)
The primary purpose of the(4 more words not shown)
- Asummarize the thematic(12 more words not shown)
- Baffirm the importance(9 more words not shown)
- Cidentify the source(8 more words not shown)
- Dcelebrate one artistic(13 more words not shown)
- Eintroduce a context(12 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
Why bring music into a discussion of a novel? Jazz shows how an artist can transform outside influences into work that is both personal and culturally expressive. The writer then applies that comparison to Ellison. My prediction is a better way to understand Invisible Man.
Working the answers
- A
The paragraph's main comparison is between music and a novelist's work, not among artists within one discipline. Its purpose isn't a survey of their respective themes.
- B
We aren't being asked to recognize the importance of music and literature as disciplines. One is being used to explain the other.
- C
The paragraph mentions Ellison's use of ideas explored by European writers, but its main job isn't tracing where his themes came from. Jazz is introduced as a model “for understanding Invisible Man,” not as an identified source of the novel's themes. An interpretation of a work and an account of its creation are different things.
- D
This gets the emphasis backward. We aren't mainly celebrating jazz through Ellison's perspective. We're using jazz to illuminate Ellison's work.
- ECorrect
Jazz is the context that helps make the novel clearer. Its transformation of European-influenced songs shows how borrowing and originality can coexist, just as Ellison transforms inherited literary material. More fully illuminated means better understood—the purpose we predicted.
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