'Victor' by W.H.Auden As Literature help? How does he tell the story?

For homework we were given an essay on 'How does Auden tell the story in Victor'. I wrote about chaplinesque imagery, intertextual references from the bible, the change in narrative voices, the progression of time and the seasons ('Frosty december', '2cnd of april' etc) amongst other things.
i got it back yesterday and i have to expand on my point about Victor and Anna meeting on april fools day and the significance of that, but he also said that i have to link it back to HOW it helps to tell the story more than i have been doing.

Could somebody please help?

So far i have:

Anna and Victor met on the first of april, which is widely celebrated as april fools day, a day where people deliberately trick each other. As they meet on this day, the implication is that throughout their relationship Victor is being taken for a fool. Anna is deceiving Victor through her adulterous ways as through her marriage vows to Victor, she has promised to remain faithful and true to him - a promise that she breaks throughout the poem. However it is never explicitley mentioned that Anna is actually being adulterous, it is all just rumour that Victor hears second hand from the bank clerks, so it could also suggest that actually Victor has been mislead and that Anna may not have been cheating on him after all. If that is the case, then Victor was foolish to act upon such rumours instantly as he did, we should not believe everything that we hear.
The fact it is april fools day has a large significance in the story, it sums up their entire relationship into a date, and tells the story of Victor in one line. It shows how foolish Victor is when it comes to love, and it tells the reader that their love will never go anywhere, that it is destined to fail as it is a joke, a fluke, and jokes always end. Anna was tricking him, stringing him along as she never really loved him, for her Victor was just a convenience, she used him for her own purposes and this is clearly shown when she said 'Victor's as dull as a wet afternoon / But i've got to settle down.'

any improvements? criticisms? things that i've missed?

Thank you,
Emma

Reply 1

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Reply 2

username1601611

If you're on AQA it could help to focus more on SFL features (structure, form, language) such as conflict, setting, time, tenses, etc and characterisation also use narrative terms referring to Victor as the protagonist. I'm also doing Auden and Browning poems and have just started AS and we were told to focus on that as we got more marks on our essays where we talked more about aspects of narrative rather than too much explanation as you would in GCSE, however of course some explanation is needed as you said, I hope this helps :smile:

'Victor' by W.H.Auden As Literature help? How does he tell the story?

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