Summary And Plot

Question 1

Summary and Plot:

Answer 1

Part One:

1. A narrator introduces us to an Ancient Mariner, who ‘stoppeth one of three’ men attending a wedding and proceeds to tell him a story.
2. The Mariner is presented as an outsider, as socially unacceptable, with his ‘long grey beard’ and ‘glittering eye’.
3. The Mariner ‘hath his will’, however, and the WG is compelled to listen, despite objecting the mariners manhandling in ‘unhand me, grey-beard loon!’, seemingly losing the agency to object.
4. The Mariner’s opening line, ‘There was a ship’, suggests that the story is automatic and has been told (and shaped through retelling) many times.
5. The Mariner begins by telling his reluctant listener about a ship that left land and sailed ‘below the kirk, below the hill’, suggestive of transgression against God and nature from the start of the embedded narrative.
6. The ship sailed southwards past the equator. A terrible storm hits the ship that is ‘tyrannous and strong’ and is described as a ‘foe’,
7. An Albatross appears and follows the ship, ‘as if it had been a Christian soul, we hailed it in God’s name’.
8. The sailors love it; they feed it every day and the ‘ice did split with a thunder-fit’, allowing them to leave the cold sea.
9. For no reason whatsoever, one day, the Mariner kills the Albatross; ‘with my cross-bow, I shot the ALBATROSS’.

Question 2

Characterisation of the Mariner in Part one:

Answer 2

1. The Mariner is presented as an outsider, as socially unacceptable, with his ‘long grey beard’ and ‘glittering eye’.
2. The Mariner is compelling: ‘He holds him with his glittering eye’ ‘The mariner hath his will’ therefore stripping the WG from the agency to object.