PGDBA 2023 Question Paper | VARC

PGDBA Previous Year Paper | PGDBA VARC Questions | Question 12

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Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him. Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal’s body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision. This distance and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have almost every day. It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature —the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella—is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom. If now and then, in the course of the centuries, efforts have been made—most effectively, perhaps, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre—to implant instruction in the novel, these attempts have always amounted to a modification of the novel form. The Bildungsroman, on the other hand, does not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel. By integrating the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most frangible justification on the order determining it. The legitimacy it provides stands in direct opposition to reality. Particularly in the Bildungsroman, it is this inadequacy that is actualized.

Question 12 : What is the difference between the novel and the story?

  1. The printing press.
  2. The novelist and the storyteller.
  3. Perplexity of meaning.
  4. The trade of the novel.

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Explanatory Answer

Vaguely worded question. Choice B is the correct answer as, according to the passage, what differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature and from storytelling in particular is that while the storyteller takes what he tells from experience and makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale, the novelist isolates himself. So, the difference between a novel and a story is in the difference between the novelist and the storyteller.
The passage also notes that the difference between the novel and the story is the dependence of the novel on the printed book and the story on the oral tradition. We chose option B over A as A is a partial answer.


The question is " What is the difference between the novel and the story? "

Hence, the answer is 'The novelist and the storyteller.'

Choice B is the correct answer.

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