An inference question asks you to finish a text’s reasoning from the clues it gives. Read the words before the blank to see whose reasoning you’re following. If the text gives a rule and a case, apply the rule to the case: find what leads to each result, then check which of those features the case has. Predict the smallest conclusion that follows from those clues. A choice can sound reasonable and still fail if it replaces the text’s rule with outside assumptions.
Hints
- Hint 1
The words “According to Okoye’s logic” tell you whose view matters. Find the two kinds of narration she contrasts and what she says each does to readers.
- Hint 2
Look at what the footnotes do to earlier events and how the narrator moves between first-person narration and addressing the reader.
- Hint 3
Match the chapter’s details to Okoye’s rule. What does she predict readers will do when a chapter uses those kinds of devices?
Step-by-step
Match the chapter to the rule
Step 1Identify whose rule controls
Okoye links immersion to a single, stable perspective that keeps its own artifice out of view. Artifice means the techniques used to build and present a story. Whose view should we use? The words According to Okoye’s logic tell us to use her rule rather than our own expectations about memoirs.
- Step 2
Place the changing voice
Where does the chapter’s changing voice fit? The narrator alternates between “I” and addressing “you,” so the voice shifts and speaks directly to the reader. Okoye lists direct address to the reader among devices that make the telling visible. Under her rule, speaking to the reader breaks immersion, so deeper identification would reverse the predicted effect.
- Step 3
Read what the footnotes do
Now ask what the footnotes actually do. They retroactively revise key events described earlier in the main text, so readers get one account of important events and then have to rethink it. The notes show the narrator changing the account after telling it, which makes the chapter’s construction visible. These footnotes expose the process of storytelling; they aren’t proof that readers should treat the account as straightforward fact.
- Step 4
Connect the rule to the ending
Which ending gives Okoye’s predicted response? She says these devices cue readers to evaluate the narrator and the construction of the story. Evaluating the narrator means asking whether the account can be trusted. Evaluating the story’s construction means asking how the story was built. The ending’s critical distance means stepping back to make those judgments. Choice B.