Observation

This question requires the candidates to give an account of how the Golden Day Incident is portrayed in the novel.

Candidates were expected to discuss the following:

• Statement of the theme, racial discrimination, invisibility of the blacks, violence etc.

• Identification of the Golden Day: the Golden Day has been a ‘church, then a bank, then it was a restaurant and a gambling house’. Psychiatric patients, doctors, lawyers, teachers, civil servants and preachers who are blacks gather at the Golden Day for sporting, gambling, drinking and girls
• The Narrator drives Mr Norton round the college. Mr Norton passes out after listening to Jim Trueblood story.
• The Golden Day Incident: the Narrator drives Mr. Norton to the Golden Day to get some whiskey for him; Halley refuses to give the Narrator the whiskey to take outside of the Golden Day premises; Sylvester helps the Narrator to bring Mr. Norton inside the building; Mr. Norton learns about the Golden Day as a place for patients sent for ‘therapy’; Mr. Norton is revived through the help of the vet.
• The significance of the incident: the incident reveals how the whites dominate the environment and discriminate against black professionals like the vet; it reveals the Golden Day as symbolic of black degeneration into insanity; it reveals the depth of the white man’s ignorance about the humanity of the blacks; it contributes to and reinforces the theme of invisibility in the novel.

Candidates performed creditably well.