RC Question 21 Explanation
DISCUSSION: You should be able to eliminate the wrong answers by finding them in the passage. If you can’t do this fast enough, then practice doing it. It’s a trainable skill, and you can get faster at it.
___________
- Line 31. You should know the third paragraph is about jazz, and look there to find the line.
- CORRECT. This isn’t mentioned.
- His response is in lines 20-23.
- Lines 47-50 show that Ellison was influenced by Europeans and African-Americans. Lines 13-15 also mention European influence.
- Lines 33-36 mention that some jazz musicians used American theatre music that was influenced by Europe.
Was Answer choice B not mentioned? The author, in the last paragraph, claims that “jazz features solos that, however daring, remain rooted in the band’s rhythm section, provides a rich model for understanding the relationship of artist to community and parallels the ways the protagonist’s voice in Invisible Man is set within a wider communal context?”
To me, this suggests that some themes in Invisible Man were clearly influenced prevalent in Jazz!
We learn in the first line of paragraph 3 that the author is using jazz as an analogy to help the reader understand Invisible Man. The lines that you’ve cited in particular don’t serve to show that Ellison’s protagonist was influenced by jazz solos. We aren’t told directly that themes in jazz influenced themes in Ellison’s writing at all. Rather, jazz solos are “rich models for understanding the relationship of the artist to the community”.