What We Can Know: 12 Analytical Essay Prompts

These essay prompts for Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know (2025) invite you to examine how the novel constructs knowledge through absence, silence, archive, and the interplay between historical fact and imaginative invention. Each prompt includes a rationale, a defensible thesis direction, and specific evidence leads from the text.

1. The Epigraph as a Narrative Contract

Why it matters: The Holmes quotation (Chapter 1) frames the entire novel as a biographer’s pursuit of truth “poised between fact and fiction.” It declares that telling another’s life is both friendship and betrayal. This prompt asks how the epigraph shapes our reading of the narrator’s choices and the novel’s epistemological questions.

Sample thesis direction: McEwan uses the epigraph not as a thematic ornament but as a contract that forces the reader to hold the narrator accountable for every act of invention, so that the novel itself becomes a test case of what biography can legitimately claim.

Evidence leads:

The epigraph’s three questions (“what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love”) are echoed throughout, especially in Tom’s ethical struggles in Chapter 9 and his final reconciliation with Rose.
The narrator in Chapter 9 admits “it was permissible to make educated guesses about the subjective states” – a direct enactment of the Holmes pact.
The Author’s Note (Chapter 24) denies hidden meaning, yet the epigraph had already licensed speculative sympathy; the two utterances enter a tense dialogue.

2. The Corona Poem: Absence as Power

Why it matters: The lost poem “A Corona for Vivien” is never read by anyone except Vivien, yet it generates a century of commentary, competitions, and political appropriation. This paradox lies at the novel’s thematic core: what we cannot have often holds more sway than what we possess.

Sample thesis direction: The Corona’s power grows precisely because it remains unread; its imagined perfection, like the “pure form” of Plato’s cave in Chapter 15, allows survivors to project their own longings onto it, transforming it into a collective symbol of lost nature.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 15: “The Corona was more beautiful for not being known” and “the imagined lords it over the actual.”
Harry Kitchener’s letter (Chapter 8) describes the poem in rapturous detail, but even he never obtained a copy.
Chapter 15 recounts competitions to recreate the poem; the winners are ignored, suggesting the real poem’s absence is more satisfying than any substitute.
Harriet Gage’s Guardian article (Chapter 12) portrays the poem as a climate protest; the oil-bribe rumour (Chapter 13) adds a conspiratorial lustre.

3. Vivien’s Sacrifice and the Problem of Voice

Why it matters: Vivien Blundy abandons her academic career to serve Francis’s genius, yet her journals (Chapter 10, 13) reveal deep dissatisfaction. The novel constantly asks who gets to speak and whose story is told – or buried.

Sample thesis direction: Vivien’s journals offer a counter-narrative to the public adoration of Francis, but even they are filtered through Tom’s editing; the novel exposes how biographical labour can recolonise a subject’s voice under the guise of recovery.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 10: Vivien journals the gap between the poem’s idyllic vision and the reality of her caregiving; she writes “I gave up my career and that was my decision.”
Chapter 13: her emended journal note “I’m a certain kind of female academic… a late developer.”
The “Note” (Chapter 23) reveals that the narrative is Tom’s edition of Vivien’s Confessions – his framing, not her raw words.
Chapter 19: Tom reads Vivien’s account of Perry’s decline and feels “detachment” before personal crisis.

4. Tom and Rose: Love as Historical Empathy

Why it matters: The relationship between Tom and Rose mirrors the Blundy marriage in its asymmetry of passion and intellectual disagreement. Their debates over how to study the past (Chapter 7, 14, 20) become a test case for the possibility of love across epistemological divides.

Sample thesis direction: Tom’s romanticisation of the past is a form of emotional refusal in the present; Rose’s insistence on “accepting the poem is lost” parallels her demand that Tom fully inhabit their own time – only through that acceptance can genuine intimacy emerge.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 7: Tom and Rose become lovers after a drunken night teaching the Inundation; their relationship begins when both are troubled by student apathy.
Chapter 14: Rose tells him to stop searching for the Corona; Tom admits he still harbours secret hopes – she argues this is cowardice, not passion.
Chapter 20: Tom invites Rose on the expedition; she sets conditions and funds the trip, signalling a reconciliation built on her terms.
The final chapter (21) ends with Rose revealing her pregnancy – a present-tense commitment that outlasts the obsession with the past.

5. Gender and Domestic Labour Across Two Marriages

Why it matters: The novel contrasts Vivien’s unpaid domestic labour (potatoes, letters, caregiving) with Mary Sheldrake’s career as a novelist and Graham’s affair. Both marriages fracture under asymmetrical emotional work, but the historical distance allows different judgements.

Sample thesis direction: McEwan uses the trivial detail – Vivien peeling Rooster potatoes, Mary breaking a bowl – to show how material conditions of housework and emotional management determine the limits of what a woman can “know” about her own life.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 3: “Blundy’s Vivien… was in the kitchen peeling potatoes” – the narrator notes the surplus of data yet the inability to capture subjective reality.
Chapter 4: Mary’s broken ceramic bowl (Jane’s work) causes distress; Vivien’s calm repair underscores her domestic coping.
Chapter 10: Vivien’s care for Percy with Alzheimer’s is gruelling; she briefly considers a home but decides against it – self-sacrifice as identity.
Chapter 13: Vivien’s “What’s the alternative? Ask him to cook?” highlights the gendered structure of the household.

6. The 90–30 Programme: Teaching Empathy for the Past

Why it matters: The programme (Chapter 9, 11) is the novel’s institutional heart. It asks how we make the past “real” for students who dismiss pre-Inundation people as destructive louts. The pedagogical method – using granular digital detail – becomes the novel’s own method.

Sample thesis direction: The 90–30 programme’s pointillist approach (Chapter 11) is both a solution and a limit: the accumulation of trivial data can create empathy, but it cannot answer the moral questions the past poses about complicity and extinction.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 11: Students only accept that past people were real after studying “the everyday life of a junior doctor” via digital traffic records.
Chapter 9: The old professors reject the narrow period; the narrator wanted to “live with the Blundys” – a desire that risks sentimental identification.
Chapter 17: Kevin Howard’s walkout symbolises generational resistance to historical memory; the students literally leave the room.
Chapter 12: The professor admits teaching post-2015 when social media distorted politics, but the difficulty of empathy remains.

7. Environmental Collapse and the “Derangement”

Why it matters: The Derangement (climate denial, species loss, the Inundation) forms the backdrop. The novel contrasts Francis’s climate denial speech (Chapter 5) with the post-2042 world of vanishing butterflies and a “shifting baseline” (Chapter 16).

Sample thesis direction: McEwan uses the Corona poem as a memento of a living biosphere; its loss mirrors species extinction, but the novel warns that nostalgia for the past can become a form of cultural paralysis rather than a spur to action.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 5: Francis delivers a “lengthy climate denial speech”; Vivien retreats in embarrassment.
Chapter 15: The Inundation of 2042 kills over 200 million; the Corona becomes a “hymn to the glories of nature” and a symbol of climate opportunity.
Chapter 16: Tom notices extinct butterflies; Rose argues his yearning for the past is unproductive.
Chapter 6: The vanished abundance of the early 21st century is juxtapposed with the narrator’s diminished present – “accumulated weight of past texts holds language steady.”

8. Silence as a Form of Knowledge

Why it matters: The novel is filled with silences: the guests’ silent reactions after Blundy reads the poem (Chapter 8), Vivien’s refusal to publish, the sealed Kitchener archive, the Author’s Note that tells us nothing is hidden.

Sample thesis direction: Silence in What We Can Know is not absence of knowledge but a deliberate withholding that protects or hurts; the narrative repeatedly shows that what is not said or recorded is often more revealing than what is archived.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 8: A “profound silence” follows the poem; each guest’s inner life is exposed – Harry decides to abandon the biography, Mary hides her self-loathing.
Chapter 13: Vivien “did not destroy the poem” but kept it private – her silence about the dedication becomes a form of emotional survival.
Chapter 12: The poem’s public emergence begins with Harriet’s article – a break of silence that triggers conspiracy.
The Author’s Note: “nothing related to the novel is buried anywhere” – an explicit claim that paradoxically invites more speculation.

9. The Ethics of Biographical Invention

Why it matters: The narrator repeatedly agonises over inventing inner lives (Chapter 9, 10). Rose argues it is “not my business… to invent.” The novel itself performs invented probabilities – and thereby stages the ethical dilemma for the reader to judge.

Sample thesis direction: McEwan defends invention as necessary for historical empathy, yet the narrative punishes Tom’s fantasy (imagining marrying Vivien) with Rose’s betrayal; the novel suggests that ethical biography requires acknowledging one’s own desires and limits.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 9: The narrator admits “unprofessional to make things up, arid not to” and feels “guilt, amplified by Rose’s scepticism.”
Chapter 10: Tom and Rose debate “speculative versus factual history” regarding Vivien’s affair with Francis.
Chapter 16: Tom daydreams about Vivien and tells Rose he could imagine marrying her – this causes a rift.
Chapter 18: Tom discovers Rose in bed with Kevin Howard; his own invented stories about the past have no defence against present realities.

10. The Unfinished Journey: The Expedition and What Is Found

Why it matters: In Chapter 21, Tom and Rose dig up a steel container expecting the Corona; they find a violin and prose – not the poem. This anticlimax reframes the entire quest.

Sample thesis direction: The discovery of Percy’s violin replaces the search for the poem with a more intimate artefact; the novel suggests that what we need is not the grand lost work but the everyday objects that connect us to the kindness of another person.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 19: Tom reads about Percy Greene’s accidental death; he realises he has overlooked Vivien’s grief for her first husband.
Chapter 21: The steel container yields a violin and a folder of prose – a personal legacy, not the celebrated poem.
Chapter 21 ends with Rose’s pregnancy – a future-oriented resolution that replaces the backward gaze.
The Note (Chapter 23) reveals the whole novel is a scholarly edition; the search was conducted by a fictional Tom, but the objects are real within the story.

11. Foreshadowing and the Structure of Regret

Why it matters: The novel’s non-linear structure (the narrator knows the future of the 2014 dinner) creates a pervasive sense of irony and impending loss. This prompt examines how McEwan uses foreshadowing to structure our understanding of causality.

Sample thesis direction: Every moment of happiness at the Second Immortal Dinner is shadowed by the narrator’s knowledge of future grief, nuclear war, and the Inundation; foreshadowing becomes a tool for showing that the past’s participants were blind to the very forces that would define their legacy.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 2: Francis’s confident preparation of the vellum poem is undercut by the knowledge that it will vanish.
Chapter 4: The hidden poem behind the clock will never be found in their lifetimes.
Chapter 8: Harry decides to stop the biography – a decision that later makes the poem’s story harder to trace.
Chapter 13: Francis’s cancer diagnosis in 2017 comes only months after the dinner; the narrator’s compassionate but detached tone highlights the cruelty of timing.
Chapter 14: Tom romanticises the past while “Metaphysical Gloom” and “Derangement” loom – the reader knows the end.

12. The Author’s Note as Epistemological Trap

Why it matters: McEwan’s one-sentence Author’s Note (Chapter 24) – “nothing related to the novel is buried anywhere” – is a direct challenge to the reader’s hermeneutic desire. It asserts that all meaning is on the surface, yet the novel has just spent 200+ pages teaching us that buried knowledge is the most potent kind.

Sample thesis direction: The Author’s Note is a paralysing gesture that robs the reader of the satisfaction of solving a puzzle; in doing so, it forces us to confront the novel’s central lesson: that we do not need hidden truths to be moved, and that love (the third of Holmes’s questions) can exist without complete knowledge.

Evidence leads:

The epigraph (Chapter 1) asks “what we can know, what we can believe, what we can love” – the Author’s Note only answers the first.
Chapter 15 argues that “the imagined lords it over the actual”; the note implies the actual is already sufficient.
Tom’s entire search ends in a violin, not the poem – the Author’s Note confirms that no further secrets exist.
The reader’s instinct to look for hidden patterns is itself a theme (the oil bribe rumour, the map reference) – McEwan short-circuits that instinct.

Using These Prompts

Each prompt is designed to be the centre of a 5–7 paragraph essay. When writing, always ground your analysis in specific chapter references and textual evidence from the supplied outline. Consider pairing prompts: for instance, combine Prompt 1 (epigraph) with Prompt 9 (ethics of invention) to explore the novel’s self-reflexivity. The strongest essays will show how formal choices (structure, foreshadowing, silence) embody the novel’s thematic questions rather than simply stating them.

For further study, consult our themes page on knowledge and uncertainty or character analysis of Vivien Blundy. You may also find the questions and answers page helpful for clarifying plot points and narrative devices.