This is a question about the passage below (The Tree of Man by Patrick White). Q.What is the likely purpose of this passage? A.To describe the loneliness of all human experience B.To demonstrate the value of our literary life C. To introduce a character. It's quite long, but I'd really appreciate it if you could answer it. ------------------------------------------- The man was a young man. His life had not yet operated on his face. He was good to look at; also, it would seem, good. Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have relinquished little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty... The name of this man was Stan Parker. While he was still unborn his mother had thought she would like to call him Ebenezer, but he was spared this because his father, an obscene man, with hair on his stomach, had laughed. So the mother thought no more about it. She was a humourless and rather frightened woman. When the time came she called her boy Stanley, which was, after all, a respectable sort of a name. She remembered also the explorer, of whom she had read. There were many things to which she did not have the answers. For this reason she did not go much with the other women, who knew, most of them, most things, and if they didn’t, it wasn’t worth knowing. So the mother of Stan Parker was alone. She continued to read, the Tennyson with brass hasps and the violets pressed inside, the spotted Shakespeare that had been in a flood, and the collection of catalogues, annuals, recipe books, and a cyclopaedia and gazetteer that composed her distinguished and protective reading. She read, and she practised neatness, as if she might tidy things up that way; only time and moth destroyed her efforts, and the souls of human beings, which will burst out of any box they are put inside. There was the young man her son, who now lay with his head on a horse’s collar, beside his bit of a fire, the son had thrown off the lid. He had sprung out, without unpleasantness, he was what you would call a good lad, good to his mother and all that, but somehow a separate being. Ah, she had said, he will be a teacher, or a preacher, he will teach the words of the poets and God. With her respect for these, she suspected, in all twilight and good faith, that they might be interpreted. But to the son, who had read the play of Hamlet in his mother’s Shakespeare, and of the Old Testament those passages in which men emerged from words, reading by day to the buzz of fly or at night while puddle cracked, there seemed no question of interpretation. Anyway, not yet. He was no interpreter. He shifted beside his fire at the suggestion that he might have been. He was nothing much. He was a man. So far he had succeeded in filling his belly. So far, mystery was not his personal concern, doubts were still faint echoes. ------------------------------------------- I guess the answer is C, but I'm not so sure...