The Enemy Class 12 NCERT Solutions PDF Download

Quick reading. Buck plants the house at the edge of the country deliberately. The American sailor washes up on Sadao's own beach; the coastal setting is the story's geographical pivot.

• Sadao's training in the US makes him a divided figure even before the prisoner arrives. He understands the enemy because he has lived among them.
• The coastal house, isolated and visible from the sea, gives Buck the staging she needs for the sailor's arrival, the General's evening visit, and the small motor-boat at night.

Dr Sadao Hoki was a respected Japanese surgeon and researcher, eight years US-trained, indispensable to the war effort. His house stood on rocks above a narrow beach on the Japanese coast, lined with bent pines.

Common mistakes. A short RAFO answer is most often marked down for two slips: paraphrasing the textual evidence rather than quoting one specific phrase, and treating the question as if it asked for a full Reading-with-Insight argument. Stay close to the text and stop at the question asked. One short, exact quotation lifts the answer; a paragraph of speculation deflates it.

Quick reading. The fear of arrest is the chapter's running suspense engine. Buck uses it to keep tension high while Sadao behaves humanely.

• Sadao names the risk early so the reader feels it through every later scene.
• The General's distracted indulgence is the chapter's quiet exit: Sadao avoids arrest not by cleverness but because the General is too busy thinking about his own gall-bladder operation to remember the prisoner.

Sadao fears he will be arrested for harbouring an enemy. In the event, he avoids arrest by treating the man secretly, by telling the General (who turns out to be too self-absorbed to act), and by arranging the escape by sea. The arrest is real as a fear; in the chapter it never arrives.

Common mistakes. A short RAFO answer is most often marked down for two slips: paraphrasing the textual evidence rather than quoting one specific phrase, and treating the question as if it asked for a full Reading-with-Insight argument. Stay close to the text and stop at the question asked. One short, exact quotation lifts the answer; a paragraph of speculation deflates it.

Quick reading. Buck stages the wash as a tiny ceremony, the way a film might. The servants leave; Hana hesitates; she does it.

• Hana's reluctance is not a flaw; it is what makes her choice moral. She is not naturally above her servants' feelings; she chooses to be.
• The wash also frees Sadao to work on the wound. The chapter's moral move is hidden inside a practical one.

Yes, Hana washes the wounded American sailor herself after the servants refuse and leave. She is reluctant but decides to obey Sadao and act on her own compassion. The wash is the chapter's first quiet act of moral courage by a Japanese character toward the ``enemy''.

Common mistakes. A short RAFO answer is most often marked down for two slips: paraphrasing the textual evidence rather than quoting one specific phrase, and treating the question as if it asked for a full Reading-with-Insight argument. Stay close to the text and stop at the question asked. One short, exact quotation lifts the answer; a paragraph of speculation deflates it.

Quick reading. Buck's structure is a slow turn from duty as a citizen to duty as a doctor. Track that turn and the question answers itself.

• Sadao starts as a Japanese patriot considering the legal route, slides into surgeon mode the moment he sees the wound, and ends as the man who arranges the escape.
• Hana's role is consistent: she chooses care from the start and never wavers.

They try to hand him over, then operate on him and save his life, then hide him for several days, then arrange his escape on a small motor-boat to an uninhabited offshore island. The chapter's arc is from patriot to surgeon.

Common mistakes. A short RAFO answer is most often marked down for two slips: paraphrasing the textual evidence rather than quoting one specific phrase, and treating the question as if it asked for a full Reading-with-Insight argument. Stay close to the text and stop at the question asked. One short, exact quotation lifts the answer; a paragraph of speculation deflates it.

Quick reading. The escape plan is also Buck's quiet argument for what a doctor's duty looks like in practice. The plan is detailed and humane.

• The torch signal is the small detail that makes the plan a real one: Sadao expects the American to survive long enough to need help.
• Telling the General that the prisoner has escaped is the chapter's smallest deceit and its largest kindness.

Sadao gives the American his motor-boat, a torch, food and water, and clear instructions to row to an uninhabited island and wait for a passing Korean fishing boat. He then tells the General the prisoner has escaped. The plan works; the American gets away.

Common mistakes. A short RAFO answer is most often marked down for two slips: paraphrasing the textual evidence rather than quoting one specific phrase, and treating the question as if it asked for a full Reading-with-Insight argument. Stay close to the text and stop at the question asked. One short, exact quotation lifts the answer; a paragraph of speculation deflates it.

Strategic angle. Pearl Buck wrote The Enemy in 1942, during the Pacific War, with Japan and the United States as declared enemies. The story is therefore an act of literary imagination across the war's front line, it asks an American reader to inhabit a Japanese surgeon's conscience. Read the conflict not just as private-vs-public, but as a deliberate moral experiment Buck is conducting on her own country's wartime hatred.

• The professional oath as the older loyalty. Sadao's teacher of anatomy taught him mercy with the knife. Sadao remembers this teacher exactly at the moment he could have killed the prisoner. Medical ethics, in Buck's frame, predates national borders.
• The American reader's mirror. Buck wants American readers to see that a Japanese doctor in the enemy camp is no less obliged than an American doctor would be. The story works as anti-prejudice argument because it locates the universal moral inside the ``enemy'' character, not outside him.
• The General's failure. The General, who has the political power to settle the issue, is too consumed by his own illness to act. Buck uses his failure to show that the public duty is unstable, a high official forgets a state matter because he is in pain. The private duty turns out to be steadier.
• Hana as the second moral voice. Hana is not just supportive; she is conscientious. She washes the wounded man's mouth, holds the anaesthetic, and shoves her own anti-foreign feelings aside. Her private duty is the doctor's twin: care for a person in need.
• The Indian Class 12 reader. The Indian equivalent of Sadao's dilemma was faced by doctors during the 1947 Partition and during the 1971 Bangladesh war: treat the wounded on the wrong side or report them? Buck's frame is portable.

Why this matters. Buck is making a deliberately universalist argument in a year (1942) when universalism was the hardest argument to make. That is why this story is on a Class 12 syllabus: it asks teenagers to think about the difference between loyalty and humanity, and to recognise that the older loyalty is humanity.

The conflict in The Enemy is the classic private-vs-public tension. Buck argues, through Sadao's hands and Hana's quiet help, that the older loyalty, a professional and human duty to a wounded person, wins. The General's self-absorbed forgetting and the servants' open defiance only prove that public loyalty is unstable. The story is Buck's wartime moral experiment in 1942: locate the universal inside the ``enemy'' and the prejudice loses its argument.

Strategic angle. Hana is the story's quiet pivot. If she had refused, Sadao could not have kept the prisoner; the servants alone would have forced delivery. Read Hana's sympathy not as wifely obedience but as a moral position she chooses, under pressure, with her body and her hands.

• Cross-cultural memory. Hana remembers Professor Harley's voluble American wife and the small, bad-food professor's house, ``the rooms so small, the food so bad''. She is sympathetic to the ridiculous professor's kindness. Buck includes this detail to make Hana's later choice psychologically continuous, she has been trained to see Americans as flawed but human.
• The marriage decision pre-figures the wartime decision. Sadao and Hana ``talked everything over beforehand'' before the marriage was arranged in the old Japanese way. They are practised at making moral choices together. The wartime crisis is just a sharper version of that practice.
• The servants as the public voice. The three servants speak the public morality of wartime Japan: the white man is the enemy and should die. Hana, by refusing to echo that voice, becomes the private moral voice of the household.
• Physical solidarity, not just verbal. Hana's sympathy is not lecturing; it is washing, holding, carrying. Buck is deliberate: sympathy proved by action is the only kind that matters. The student should quote the washing and the ether moment, not general statements of feeling.
• The Indian parallel. The Indian Class 12 reader can compare Hana with characters like Bishan Singh's mother in Manto, or with Bibi Amrita Sher-Gil's nurses during Partition, women who, against social and political pressure, do the bodily work of caring for the ``wrong side''.

Why this matters. The Board wants students to recognise that Hana is not a passive figure following her husband. She is the moral hinge of the story. A weak answer says ``Hana loved Sadao''. A strong answer says ``Hana's American education, her doctor's-wife training, and her personal courage combined to make her stand against the servants and hold the ether cone herself''.

Hana stays with Sadao because she has been trained, by her years in America, by her marriage to a surgeon, and by her personal sense of honour, to see a patient before a nationality. Her sympathy proves itself in bodily action: washing the prisoner's mouth, holding the anaesthetic, retching in the garden and returning. The servants' open defiance escalates the cost of her choice, but she makes it anyway. She is the moral hinge of the story.

Strategic angle. The clinical literature on prisoners of war recognises a specific reluctance to leave even when the escape is offered. The phenomenon has a name in the psychiatry of war captivity, ``learned helplessness within a safe environment''. Read the soldier's hesitation through that lens, and the answer becomes more than a sentimental account.

• Acute injury and recovery psychology. A bullet wound under the shoulder, surgically removed, leaves a patient physically dependent for at least five to seven days. The body genuinely cannot run.
• Caregiver attachment. When a person who has been brutalised by strangers is then nursed by strangers, the nursing creates a powerful emotional bond. The soldier has begun to identify Sadao and Hana as safe figures.
• Loss of agency. Captives lose the habit of making decisions. Even when handed back their freedom, they often hesitate because the muscle for choice has atrophied. Buck is observing this in novelistic detail in the 1940s, before the psychological literature caught up.
• The unknown next environment. The plan is to sail to a small island and wait for a Korean fishing boat. ``Korean fishing boat'' is itself only a promise; the soldier has no reason to trust the next stage. Buck deliberately leaves the next leg unresolved.
• The signal-flash mechanism. Sadao's instruction, flash a torch only if you need more food, gives the soldier a way to stay connected to the shelter while physically moving away. Buck uses this as the bridge: the soldier can leave because the cord is not entirely cut.
• Indian readers' comparison point. Compare with the reluctance of refugees in Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi or with the trauma-attached survivors in Bhisham Sahni's Tamas. The pattern is the same: a survivor lingers in the first safe space because leaving means another unknown.

Why this matters. The Board wants the student to look inside the soldier, not just outside him. The simple ``he was afraid'' answer earns a single mark. The layered answer, physical weakness, caregiver attachment, loss of agency, fear of the next environment, earns the full band. Buck is doing careful psychological observation; the answer should match the care.

The soldier's reluctance is a layered response. He is physically still recovering from the surgery; he has formed an emotional attachment to the caregivers who, against expectation, have treated him as a person; he has lost the captive's habit of decision; and the next environment (a small island, a promised Korean fishing boat) is itself an unknown. Sadao's clever signal-flash mechanism gives him a way to leave without cutting the cord entirely. The soldier moves only when that bridge is in place.

Strategic angle. The General is the only character in the story who has formal political power, and Buck deliberately fills him with personal frailty. Read the General as a miniature portrait of authority in wartime, it claims totality but is actually fragmented by pain, ego and self-interest.

• Power on paper, weakness in person. The General has the authority to order an arrest, a trial, an execution. He has none of the will or the attention to follow through. Buck is showing that wartime authority is not as monolithic as it pretends.
• The doctor-patient inversion. In society, the General outranks Sadao. But on the operating table, Sadao outranks the General. Buck stages this inversion explicitly: ``the General was in the palm of his hand''.
• Why Buck chose `self-absorption' over `compassion'. If the General had spared the prisoner out of compassion, Buck would have written a sentimental story about war waking up the human heart. She has written something colder: the prisoner is saved because the official forgot. That is the more truthful version of how mercy often arrives in war.
• Patriotism not abandoned. The General is careful to say that his forgetting was not ``dereliction of duty''. Even at his most self-absorbed, he wants Sadao to confirm his loyalty. Patriotism remains intact as identity even when it fails as action.
• Rewards and silence. The General promises Sadao a reward and asks him to keep silent. The political machinery rewards the doctor who keeps the secret of the official's forgetting. This is Buck's quiet satire of wartime patronage.
• Indian comparison. A useful parallel is Manto's ``Toba Tek Singh'', where bureaucratic forgetting (the unsorted file of an inmate) determines a life. Buck and Manto, writing in different traditions, share the insight that war can spare people through neglect as easily as it kills them through intent.

Why this matters. The Board phrases the question as a multiple-choice prompt with four options to keep students disciplined. The right answer (self-absorption) sounds the least heroic, which is why it is the least often chosen. A strong response names this directly: Buck is making a deliberately unheroic point.

The General's attitude is best explained as self-absorption. He retains his patriotism (he insists on it), he does not refuse the order (he forgets it), and he never claims compassion. Buck stages the General as power-on-paper but weakness-in-person; the doctor-patient inversion at the operation makes the General dependent on Sadao, and his own pain crowds the prisoner out of his mind. The prisoner is spared by neglect, not by mercy, which is Buck's cooler, more honest account of wartime escape.

Strategic angle. Pearl Buck is writing this story in 1942, when the United States is at war with Japan, and Japanese- Americans are being interned in camps. The story is a quiet moral letter from one American to her countrymen: the people you are calling enemies are surgeons, wives, fathers. Read the ``rising above prejudice'' as Buck's own act of rising above the American war propaganda of her time.

• Wartime prejudice is real. Buck does not pretend it is irrational. The servants are afraid for their country. Sadao himself notices he is uneasy being alone in a room with a white man. The story treats the prejudice as a real psychological force.
• The mechanisms that override it. Buck names three: professional vocation (the doctor's training), lived cross-cultural experience (the years in America), and personal honour (the inability to do harm with one's own hands).
• What Buck does NOT say. She does not say ``love your enemy''. She does not say ``embrace the other''. Her formulation is colder and more useful: do not put the man back into the sea.
• The Indian reader's bridge. The same three mechanisms operate in Indian wartime ethics. The 1971 Bangladesh war stories of Hindu doctors treating Pakistani soldiers; the Kargil war stories of Indian soldiers carrying wounded Pakistani prisoners down from the heights. Vocation, lived experience, personal honour, the same triad.
• The classroom application. A teenager reading the story today is not at war but is surrounded by lower-grade prejudices, caste, region, religion, language. Buck's triad scales down: vocation, lived experience, personal honour are the three things a young person can build to inoculate themselves against group hatred.
• The final sentence as honesty. ``Strange, I wonder why I could not kill him?'' is not a celebration. It is a puzzled admission. Buck refuses to give Sadao a clear moral victory. The story is more powerful for that refusal.

Why this matters. The Board asks this question because it is the chapter's central value-based prompt. A weak answer recites general slogans about humanity. A strong answer names the three mechanisms Buck specifies and grounds each in textual evidence.

Buck's answer to the rising-above question is a triad: a professional vocation older than the war (Sadao's doctor's oath), lived cross-cultural memory (the years in America), and private moral honour (the inability to do harm with one's own hands). She does not say ``love your enemy'' or ``embrace the other''. She says, in cooler terms, ``do not put the man back into the sea''. The story's final puzzled sentence, ``why I could not kill him?'', is the honest answer: rising above prejudice is rarely a clean victory; it is, more often, the refusal to commit the harm.

Strategic angle. The chapter is on a Class 12 syllabus because the Board wants students to think about real-world ethical decision-making under constraint. ``Best possible'' does not mean ``ideal''. It means ``the optimum within the available choice set''. Read Sadao's plan as an exercise in constrained optimisation.

• What an `ideal' solution would have looked like. An ideal solution would have been: the General sends the assassins; the prisoner is dispatched without Sadao's involvement; Sadao's oath is preserved by absence. Buck rules this out, the General forgets.
• A worse solution would have been delivery to the police. The prisoner is hanged or worked to death in a labour camp. Sadao's oath is broken; his marriage to Hana is strained; the servants are rewarded for their hostility. Buck rules this out: Sadao's professional honour forbids it.
• Another worse solution: putting the man back in the sea. Sadao considers this option openly with Hana. They reject it. Putting a healed patient back into mortal danger is the inverse of the doctor's oath. Buck rules this out as well.
• Why the chosen solution is the best. It uses the natural escape route (the offshore island), the natural smuggling network (the Korean fishing boat), and the natural caregiving cue (the signal-flash for more food). Each piece is plausible.
• Long-term consequences for Sadao. He carries a secret. He has lost a moment of patriot purity. He will spend the rest of his life unable to explain exactly why he did what he did. Buck's last sentence, ``why I could not kill him?'', shows that the ``best solution'' still leaves a psychological cost.
• Indian Class 12 reader's comparison. A useful parallel is the dilemma in Premchand's ``Idgah'' (the boy's choice of the tongs over the toy): a constrained optimum that is not ideal but is the best available. Both stories ask students to evaluate decisions against constraints, not against ideals.

Why this matters. The Board wants the student to weigh, not to pronounce. A weak answer says ``yes, it was the best solution'' or ``no, it was wrong''. A strong answer names the constraints, walks through the alternatives, and explains why the chosen plan is the optimum within those constraints. That weighing structure is the highest-band response.

Yes, the doctor's solution is the best possible within the constraints. Reporting the man breaks Sadao's oath; killing him breaks his person; putting him back into the sea inverts his profession; relying on the General fails because the General forgets. Within that narrow set of available choices, the food-water-torch-boat-island-Korean-fishing-boat plan is the optimum. It is not ideal, it leaves Sadao with a permanent moral question and an uncertain Korean rendezvous, but it is the best the constraints allow.

Strategic angle. The two stories were placed in adjacent NCERT readers (Snapshots in Class 11, Vistas in Class 12) precisely so students could see the recurring ``doctor-as-moral-actor'' figure across years. Read The Enemy as Buck's wartime variant of the Cronin template.

• Cronin's template. A doctor + a patient almost given up on + a technical intervention + an unwilling environment + a quiet ending. This is the Cronin formula.
• Buck's wartime adaptation. Buck takes the same template and substitutes wartime nationalism for Cronin's village fatalism. The doctor's task becomes morally heavier because the patient is the enemy.
• The midwife / wife parallel. In Birth, Susan Morgan (the mother) is exhausted; Joe Morgan helps when asked. In The Enemy, Hana plays a similar role of practical assistance, holding the ether cone, washing the prisoner's mouth, because the servants refuse.
• The doctor's self-questioning ending. Andrew's last reflection is on whether he should stay in Blaenelly. Sadao's last reflection is on whether he could ever kill an enemy face he has nursed. Both endings put the doctor inside his own head, not in front of a grateful crowd.
• Why both authors choose doctors. A doctor is the rare professional whose duty crosses social, political and personal lines. Cronin and Buck both use doctors to test ethical extremes that other professions cannot bear.
• Indian comparison. A useful Indian parallel is the doctor figure in Krishan Chander's stories, where the medical man becomes the conscience of the community. The Cronin-Buck template has been used in Indian writing too.

Why this matters. For the comparison question, the Board wants the student to demonstrate two things at once: recall of the Snapshots story from Class 11, and the ability to draw structural parallels. A strong answer names the template (doctor + given-up patient + technical intervention + hostile context + quiet ending) and applies it to both stories.

Yes, The Enemy echoes Cronin's Birth structurally. Both deploy a young principled doctor, a patient the surrounding world has written off (stillborn baby, dying enemy soldier), a technical intervention as the moral act (the revival routine, the surgery), an unwilling environment (village fatalism, wartime nationalism), and a quiet self-questioning ending. Cronin sets the template; Buck transports it to wartime Japan. The architecture is the same, only the political weight is higher in Buck.

Strategic angle. The theme of The Enemy, a person who chooses humanity over prejudice in a hostile official frame, is one of the most repeated themes in world literature and cinema. The student's answer should demonstrate breadth (across countries and across media) and depth (one or two close textual links per example).

• The recurring shape. A protagonist in a position of official duty (doctor, soldier, officer, industrialist) finds themselves face to face with a person their official duty calls ``enemy''. They cannot do the official harm. They protect, hide, feed, save, or refuse to deliver.
• Why this shape recurs. Because it captures the moral situation modern citizens find themselves in most often: caught between an institutional identity and a personal moment. The student should recognise that this is not a war-specific theme; it scales to peacetime conflicts too.
• The Indian cinematic lineage. Garam Hawa (M. S. Sathyu, 1973), Tamas (Govind Nihalani, 1988), Border (J. P. Dutta, 1997), Bombay (Mani Ratnam, 1995), Maachis (Gulzar, 1996), all stage a protagonist's moment of refusal against communal, national or political prejudice.
• The international cinematic lineage. Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), Hotel Rwanda (George, 2004), In the Heat of the Night (Jewison, 1967), The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006). Different settings, same moral architecture.
• Novels in the same lineage. Apart from Khushwant Singh and Ondaatje, consider Bhisham Sahni's Tamas, Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh, Amrita Pritam's Pinjar, Camus's The Plague, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. All stage the same crisis.
• Why the Board asks this. CBSE wants students to leave school recognising that the moral situation Buck stages is not unique to 1942 Japan; it is the situation of every citizen caught between an institutional identity and a personal moment.

Why this matters. The Board is testing whether the student can move from a single text to a broader literary or cinematic field. The strongest answers carry two specific examples, with the theme link clearly spelled out in each. They also pull at least one Indian example and one international example, to show breadth.

The theme of The Enemy, a citizen who refuses to do the harm official prejudice demands, runs through Polanski's The Pianist, Spielberg's Schindler's List, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Minghella's The English Patient, and Mani Ratnam's Bombay. Indian films like Garam Hawa, Tamas, Maachis and novels like Manto's Toba Tek Singh sit inside the same tradition. Buck's 1942 story is one chapter in a long literary lineage about private humanity outranking official prejudice.