중앙고 2026 고1 2학기 중간 · 공통영어2

The above is a shortened version of the opening of the novel Dry (2018). It tells the story of a girl who has to make tough choices for her family during a disastrous California drought. Fortunately, her unwanted adventure ends when the water supply resumes and life is back to normal. Provided that the factors contributing to water shortages worldwide are not addressed, including climate change, population growth, and using too much water for agriculture, it is possible that this story can become a reality.

Standing before a painting, you see ① an anguished man staring back at you. He grasps his hair with both hands, ② as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. This work is Gustave Courbet’s The Desperate Man, a self-portrait ③ that reflect his personal struggles as well as the hardships of the human condition. Born in 1819, Courbet was a revolutionary French artist ④ widely considered the father of European Realism. This movement rejected idealized portrayals in favor of raw depictions of everyday life. Courbet created many masterpieces ⑤ featuring regular people engaged in exhausting activities. For example, The Stonebreakers shows an old man and a youth ⑥ dressing in torn and stained clothes breaking and clearing rocks to build a road. This image reveals the difficulties ⑦ that laborers faced in their daily lives. However, critics harshly viewed Courbet’s work, ⑧ accused him of establishing a “cult of ugliness” because he focused on uncomfortable subjects rather than noble or mythological figures. But Courbet dismissed their opinions, saying, “Show me an angel and I will paint one.” What he meant by this was ⑩ that his goal was to create accurate portrayals of real life. Whether his subjects were ugly or not did not matter; they were people he had seen and encountered.

But it is later revealed that the relationship was nothing more than Arthur’s imagination. When we hear a story, we naturally experience it through the storyteller’s perspective, especially when we haven’t witnessed the events firsthand. Filmmakers sometimes take advantage of this by using an unreliable narrator—a storytelling technique in which the person telling the story misleads the audience. But why do directors choose this technique? One major reason is to create suspense and shocking plot twists. In The Usual Suspects, the main character Verbal Kint, a nervous, low-level gang member who walks with a limp, narrates a complex story about a mysterious and terrifying gang leader to a detective. As the story unfolds, the audience becomes fully immersed in his perspective. But in the film’s final moments, his limp vanishes as he walks away, revealing that he had fabricated the entire story. The terrifying figure he had spoken of was not someone else, but him. This revelation leaves viewers stunned and forces them to reconsider everything they believed about the story. Directors occasionally include unreliable narrators to give the audience insight into a character’s mindset. In the movie Joker, the main character Arthur believes he is in a romantic relationship with his neighbor Sophie. By seeing the delusions that Arthur experiences, the audience experiences a mixture of sympathy and discomfort toward him, even when he commits violent acts. In essence, this narrative technique immerses audiences in the character’s story, allowing them to form a deeper emotional connection with the character.