Crocodiles · deciding to leave and speaking from two worlds
Explain a decision through limited alternatives and selective hope · Distinguish sincere confidence from knowledge of the journey · Analyse the conversation about culturally mixed comparisons
Section 2025-P3-A · 2025–2027 · Set-text extract response
Exam scope and assessment notes
0408 preparation for exam year(s) 2025, 2026, 2027. The assessment changes in 2028; follow the component and selected texts for your year. Original StudyForA teaching for the 2025–2027 Paper 3 option In the Sea There Are Crocodiles, by Fabio Geda, translated by Howard Curtis. Twenty-eight lessons teach the Author’s Note and all six country chapters, with passage, whole-book essay, voice and retrieval workshops. All three complete 2025–2027 selected-work entries link this whole-book teaching pathway. Reading completion, qualified teacher assessment and calibrated full papers are not certified by these self-review exercises. Read the entire unabridged centre-selected book; lessons and models do not replace it. The public reader is a reflowed 133-page version; its page numbers are locators, not certified centre-edition pagination. Use your copy for exact wording, typography and paragraph breaks. The protected book is linked, not reproduced here. Questions and models are original self-review and do not award Cambridge marks or grades. Other well-supported readings can be valid. Qualified literature-teacher review and calibrated full papers remain unfinished. In 2025–2027, Paper 3 is closed book: 90 minutes, one extract response and one whole-text essay, 25 marks each. This book is not a 2028–2030 Paper 3 option. It is excluded from 2025–2027 coursework because it is on those years’ Paper 3 lists; private candidates cannot enter 0408. The lessons analyse a narrative of past experience, not present-day travel, legal or personal-safety advice.
Before you begin
- Read the Author’s Note and the named chapter scenes in the centre’s complete Howard Curtis translation. Use the linked reader’s text version if needed; its page numbering differs from print editions.
- Distinguish the experiencing child, the later narrating Enaiat, Fabio’s conversational questions and the authorial/translation process. Reconstructed dialogue is not a certified recording.
- Read all six country chapters before the whole-book workshops. Teaching availability does not certify individual reading, mastery or an official assessment result.
Work on paper. Try each question before revealing help, and explain why your method works.
Quick readiness check
What should support a claim about a literary text?
What you will learn
- Explain a decision through limited alternatives and selective hope
- Distinguish sincere confidence from knowledge of the journey
- Analyse the conversation about culturally mixed comparisons
Crocodiles · hope, trust and a changing voice
- Read the named scenes in the complete centre-selected book or the linked public reading before answering. The protected book is not reproduced here.
- Reader page numbers identify this web version only. Use chapter and scene locators when working with another edition.
- Write your own developed response before opening the model. Use brief accurate evidence from your copy; paraphrase plainly when exact wording is uncertain.
Original whole-book teaching and self-review, not official Cambridge questions, marks, coursework or a calibrated full paper. The lessons and models do not replace reading the complete centre-selected book or qualified assessment.
A decision with limits
Read the factory discussion, returned travellers, Farid and the go-between, reader pp.71–76.
1. How does the narrative make the decision to leave understandable without presenting it as fully informed?
Compare after trying
Work and danger make remaining difficult, while the friends’ contribution offers a practical possibility of departure. The interruption for football keeps the decision inside a young person’s social life rather than making it an abstract calculation.
Warnings are already available, but Enaiat needs the possibility contained in a successful story. The later voice corrects his confident readiness and exposes the go-between’s lack of experience. I understand the hope while seeing the unequal information on which it depends.
Why this response fits
- Connect pressures, relationships and selective attention.
- Distinguish retrospective qualification from a claim that no choice existed.
More than one world inside a voice
Read Fabio’s question about the comparisons and Enaiat’s answer, reader p.73.
1. How does the brief conversation about comparisons affect your understanding of the narrative voice?
Compare after trying
Fabio notices a difference between comparisons and treats it as a possible mismatch between cultural worlds. Enaiat’s answer changes the premise: the present teller does not have to inhabit only one of those worlds.
The exchange makes later knowledge part of the telling rather than a flaw that must be removed. It also reminds me that the child’s experience reaches us through conversation, authorial shaping and translation. I would analyse the comparison’s effect without claiming that its exact form was spoken in childhood.
Why this response fits
- Explain the change in the listener’s assumption.
- Distinguish experience from the later language used to tell it.
Choosing does not mean knowing every consequence
The new chapter looks back over an approximate four and a half years since Nava. Sufi has gone to Teheran; he is not the companion taking this mountain journey. Enaiat first stays at the factory to save money, and friends help fund his departure. Their contribution makes solidarity part of the decision rather than turning the journey into one isolated boy’s achievement. Football interrupts the discussion, keeping ordinary youth beside a life-changing choice. The later voice revisits his confident readiness and cannot say with certainty whether full foreknowledge would have stopped him. The correction qualifies the earlier confidence without making the decision unreal.
Hope selects what it can bear
Returned travellers have already described terrible losses, and a disfigured boy gives suffering a particular face. Enaiat has heard warnings; he is not simply unaware that danger exists. Nevertheless, he needs a story in which someone gets through. That selective attention makes hope necessary and precarious. Farid’s relationship to the go-between encourages trust, and the narrator believes that man’s reassurance is sincere. Sincerity still does not supply experience: the man has not made the trek he describes. His inspection of the shoes and three-day promise create expectations that the later journey will overturn.
A voice can hold more than one cultural world
Fabio notices comparisons associated with very different places and habits. Enaiat answers by locating both worlds inside his present self. This exchange asks readers to distinguish the child’s earlier situation from the resources of the later teller. A contemporary comparison need not be something the child used at that moment, nor does its presence make the remembered experience false. The scene also challenges the listener’s expectation that a person’s language must belong to one sealed culture. Read the conversation within Geda’s constructed narrative and Curtis’s translation, rather than as an untouched recording of childhood speech.
Sources for this lesson
- Cambridge World Literature 0408 · 2025–2027 · Version 2
- Cambridge 0408 · revised 2025–2027 component weightings
- Cambridge World Literature 0408 · 2028–2030 · Version 1
- Geda · In the Sea There Are Crocodiles · Howard Curtis translation · public 133-page reading and text version
- Howard Curtis · first-person account of translating Geda’s book · English PEN
- In the Sea There Are Crocodiles · publisher’s edition and translator record · Penguin
Pause and explain
Does the narrator’s belief in the go-between’s good faith establish that the man knows the mountain journey?
Worked example
Refine “The trafficker’s sincere promise proves the journey will take three days”.
Show the worked solution
- The teller believes this go-between means what he says.
- The same passage explains that he has never made the trek.
Answer Trust in a person’s intentions does not make that person’s prediction reliable.
Try a topic test
Choose Easy, Normal or Difficult. Save your answers and open worked review after finishing.
Test this topic →From guided practice to a new situation
Write your answer and reasoning first. Use a hint only if you are stuck. The model solution is for self-checking; your written work is not automatically marked.
How does the later voice qualify the earlier claim to be ready?
Give me a hint
Retain the uncertainty in the imagined alternative.
Compare my reasoning
- He recognises how little he understood.
- He does not know whether full knowledge would have changed his choice.
The retrospective correction complicates confidence without supplying a certain alternative history.
Look for these in your work
- Use the change of perspective
- Keep the counterfactual uncertain
Why does one successful story matter after many warnings?
Give me a hint
Compare the information available with what the listener needs.
Compare my reasoning
- Danger has already been described.
- He looks for a possibility of getting through.
Selective hope helps make action possible, while the surrounding warnings prevent readers from treating hope as evidence of safety.
Look for these in your work
- Recognise existing knowledge
- Explain selection
What does the mixed-comparisons exchange reveal about voice?
Give me a hint
Distinguish the past child from the present teller.
Compare my reasoning
- Fabio treats the comparisons as belonging to different worlds.
- Enaiat locates both worlds in his present self.
The dialogue makes identity and narration capable of holding experiences from different times and places.
Look for these in your work
- Use both speakers
- Connect language and identity
Common mistakes
- Do not put Sufi in the mountain group or confuse him with Farid.
- Do not present the later teller’s comparisons as a verbatim transcript of the child’s language.
What can you explain now?
Does the narrator’s belief in the go-between’s good faith establish that the man knows the mountain journey?
Compare with the explanation
No; the man is a go-between who has not made that trek.
The scene separates intention, trust and actual knowledge.
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Make it stick
Does the narrator’s belief in the go-between’s good faith establish that the man knows the mountain journey?
If you needed the solution, close it and solve the problem again from a blank page. A correct answer is stronger when you can explain the reason for each step.