2023

AP English Literature
and Composition
®

Free-Response Questions
Set 2

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AP® English Literature and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION
SECTION II
Total time—2 hours
3 Questions

Question 1
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
In William Ellery Channing’s poem “The Barren Moors,” published in 1843, the speaker addresses moors, open
expanses of wild, uncultivated land. Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Channing
uses literary elements and techniques to develop a complex portrayal of the speaker’s experience of this natural
setting.
In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.
The Barren Moors
On your bare rocks, O barren moors,
On your bare rocks I love to lie,—
They stand like crags upon the shores,
Line Or clouds upon a placid sky.

No friend’s cold eye, or sad delay,
Shall vex me now where not a sound
Falls on the ear, and every day
20 Is soft as silence most profound.

Across those spaces desolate,
The fox pursues his lonely way,
Those solitudes can fairly sate 1
The passage of my loneliest day.

No more upon these distant wolds 2
The agitating world can come,
A single pensive thought upholds
The arches of this dreamy home.

5

10

Like desert Islands far at sea
Where not a ship can ever land,
Those dim uncertainties to me,
For something veritable stand.

25

A serious place distinct from all
Which busy Life delights to feel,
15 I stand in this deserted hall,
And thus the wounds of time conceal.

Within the sky above, one thought
Replies to you, O barren moors!
Between, I stand, a creature taught
To stand between two silent floors.
1

fully satisfy

2

hills

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AP® English Literature and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions

Question 2
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
The following excerpt is from Brenda Peynado’s short story “The Rock Eaters,” published in 2021. In this passage,
the narrator is one of a group of people who left their home country after developing the ability to fly, an ability that
is accepted as realistically possible within the story. Years later, the group returns to that country with their children.
Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Peynado uses literary elements and
techniques to convey the narrator’s complex experience of this return home.
In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.
We were the first generation to leave our island
country. We were the ones who developed a distinct
float to our walk on the day we came of age. Soon
Line enough we were hovering inches above the ground,
5 then somersaulting with the clouds, finally
discovering we could fly as far as we’d ever wanted.
And so we left. Decades later, we brought our
children back to see our home country. That year, we
all decided we were ready to return.
10
We jackknifed through clouds and dodged large
birds. We held our children tightly; they had not yet
learned to fly. Behind us trailed roped-together lines
of suitcases packed with gifts from abroad. We
wondered who would remember us.
15
Our parents, those who were still alive, came out to
greet us, hands on their brows like visors. Some were
expecting us. Others were surprised, terrified at the
spectacle of millions of their prodigals 1 blotting the
sky with our billowing skirts, our shirts starched for
20 the arrival. We touched down on our parents’
driveways, skidding to rough landings at their feet,
denting cars, squashing flowers, rattling windows.
Our old friends and siblings, the ones we’d left
behind, kept their doors locked. They peered through
25 window blinds at the flattened flowerbeds, the
suitcases that had burst and strewn packages all over
the yards and streets, our youngest children squealing
now that they’d been released, the peace we’d broken
by returning. They didn’t trust us, not after our
30 betrayal decades ago, the whiff of money we’d earned
or lost in other countries like a suspect stench. Our
parents hugged their grandchildren and brought them
inside to houses with no electricity, candles wavering
like we were in a séance. “More brownouts,” they told

us. “We remember,” we said, recoiling at how little
the place fit us anymore. Those first nights we slept in
our old beds, our feet hanging over the edges, the
noises of the city and the country crowing and
honking us awake, music from radios and guitars,
40 celebrations we’d not been invited to.
We dragged our children along to knock on the
doors of old friends and siblings, the ones who never
developed the ability to fly. They eventually,
reluctantly, opened their doors. At first we sat stiffly
45 on couches and inquired after their health and others
we once knew. Then we got them to laugh with us
about the time we pulled the nuns’ skirts or put gum
in the kink of a rival’s hair, when we caught baby
chicks in the village and raised them, or cracked open
2
50 almonds on the malecón. Then their children came
shyly out of their rooms and took ours by the hand.
We smiled when we saw them climbing trees together
in the patios, their children showing ours how to eat
cajuilitos solimán and acerolas 3 from the branch.
55
We introduced our children to everyone we used to
know: at colmados, 4 by the side of the road, at the
baseball fields, at country clubs we had to beg to be
let back into. We showed our children the flamboyán
trees in the parks, blooms of coral red spilling in the
60 dirt. We showed them the granite striated through the
rock faces of mountains, the glimmering pebbles
under waterfalls, the red dust that stained the seats of
their best clothes. We walked past the stray dogs that
growled and whined; the most ancient among them
65 remembered us, wagging their tails when they saw us
and running to sniff our offspring. We dunked our
children into the rivers we’d once swum. We dug
through the banks for the arrowheads that belonged to
35

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AP® English Literature and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions

the Tainos, who’d been erased after the Spanish came,
their remnants lost in the mud.
Lost, the children whispered in awe and fear,
turning the black, glinting points in their palms,
testing the hardness of flint between their teeth. Back
in our foreign homes, we had never talked to them of
75 history.
We remembered we’d been happy. “We loved this
land,” we said. We forget why we ever left.
70

1

children who have left home and then returned

2

a walkway along a waterfront

3

Cajuilitos solimán and acerolas are types of fruit.

4

neighborhood stores

Excerpt from THE ROCK EATERS: STORIES by Brenda Peynado, copyright (c) 2021 by Brenda Peynado.
Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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and fill in the appropriate circle at the top of each page to indicate the question number.

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AP® English Literature and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions

Question 3
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)

Many works of literature feature a rebel character who changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or
political affairs in the text. They may break social norms, challenge long-held values, subvert expectations, or
participate in other forms of resistance. The character’s motivation for this rebellious behavior is often complex.
Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a character changes or
disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the
complex motivation of the rebel contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize
the plot.
In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Provide evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

Antigone
Arcadia
Atonement
The Awakening
Brave New World
Catch-22
Ceremony
The Color Purple
The Crucible
Fahrenheit 451
Fences
Frankenstein
The Glass Menagerie
Grendel
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Handmaid’s Tale
House Made of Dawn
The House of the Spirits
In the Time of the Butterflies
Invisible Man
Jane Eyre

The Joy Luck Club
Kindred
King Lear
Let the Great World Spin
Love Medicine
Moll Flanders
The Namesake
Native Son
Never Let Me Go
The Nickel Boys
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Paradise Lost
Pride and Prejudice
A Raisin in the Sun
The Scarlet Letter
Southernmost
Sula
Their Eyes Were Watching God
There There
Washington Black
Wuthering Heights

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and fill in the appropriate circle at the top of each page to indicate the question number.
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AP® English Literature and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions

STOP

END OF EXAM

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