The Parable of Multiple Choice By Colin Corcoran I was perfectly aware that the English exam was going to be difficult before I entered the room, cast a shade of yellow from the overhead lights. It was about 8:25 (I had done a fairly good job of keeping track of time) when I became utterly stuck on a very tough question. What I truly regret was that I chose to ignore the wise words of my teacher, and her request not to become too hung up on a single question faded into nothing. The question, which concerned the second passage of four on the multiple choice section of the exam was as follows: “The description of the dandelion as ‘a horrible, beautiful yellow,’ serves…”
The passage in question was a brief excerpt from a melancholy memoir about the
effects of weeding on a young boy in a country that I’m fairly sure was Ireland. Throughout the passage was an amplified use of parallel constructions and lovingly crafted imagery, which served to highlight the repeated oppressions of the child. Scanning the passage, I detected the quote on line 37, preceded by, “After I witnessed the sun dip down another miserable inch, I bent down upon my knees and grasped the flower, a horrible, beautiful yellow.” My sore hands gripped the paper, whose words spelled such awful things, but wrote such stunning images, and I began to read the five possible responses.
The first answer, marked as A, was well known to me as the ‘attractor,’ used as a
devilish agent to appear as the answer. It calls out to all susceptible students with its simple language and seemingly obvious logic, declaring, “Pick me! Forget the others! Don’t even bother to read them! Just pick me!” This time, A chose to say, “to emphasize the irony of the experience.” Irony (the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant), the key attracting term, whose definitions were so varied that the choice seemed obvious, jumped out to me as if highlighted in yellow. While the flower being described as “horrible” does almost transmit an example of verbal irony, it is too vague to qualify as an answer. I silenced the attractor’s calls with a mark from my pencil.
“to refer to the motif of yellow throughout the passage,” was what B decided to say. I
had not realized until then that yellow was even a motif (a repeated word, phrase, or idea) and
21 PERKSPECTIVES