The duality between how Racine lived in the theatre and his life of fa

A is not parallel
B Meaning error in " Racine's life of the theatre and Not only is not used properly as should come after not only to maintain parallelism .
C Grammatically correct
D Again correct
E Not parallel as not only should be followed by as

Hi GMATNinja
If concision is the key here the i think D is the answer but still i think there is some subtle difference between C and D .
Experts please help in this one

parallelism issue -> "should be seen not only as" -> eliminate B and E
his life of faith and devotion" vs "his faithful and devotional life" -> not a big issue
".Racine’s life in the theatre" makes most sense -> D

But what is the antecedent of HIS in choice D?

The duality between how Racine lived in the theatre and his life of faith and devotion should be seen not only as an internal division but also as a possible reason that Racine, in an age of optimism, selected tragedy as the preferred form.

A.how Racine lived in the theatre and his life of faith and devotion should be seen not only as
B.Racine’s life of the theatre and his life of faith and devotion should be seen as not only
C.theatrical life of Racine and his faithful and devotional life should be seen not only as
D.Racine’s life in the theatre and his life of faith and devotion should be seen not only as
E.Racine’s life of the theatre and his faithful and devotional life should be seen as not only

The sentence says that the duality between X and Y should be seen not only as A but also as B.
Here X must be || to Y and A must be parallel to B.
Now for A and B we can see that in the non underlined part of the sentence the strucure is but also as .Therefore A must have the same struc not only as A but also as Y.
So we know there must be an as at the end of the underlined part.

Eliminate B and E for the aforementioned reason.

Now let's deal X and Y.
Racine's life of(.faith and devotion......) is compared to his life in(...theatre)
So life with prepositional phrase is the structure .

D is the one that follows this structure.

Still confused Can somebody explain in detail
Not only as ?

not only as is following the parallelism with the nonunderlined portion "but also as"

Thanks SandhyAvinash

I suppose you could make a parallelism argument against (C), but I think the bigger issue is meaning:

• "life in the theatre" = life as somebody who works in theatre, presumably as an actor or director or writer; "theatrical life" = a life spent behaving theatrically, which could just mean that Racine is a little bit of a drama queen, but might not actually be a theatre professional
• "life of faith and devotion" = presumably, a life lived according to the principles of a religious faith; "faithful and devotional life" = ... actually, I don't know what the hell that means -- I'm not sure that it makes any sense at all, but at the very least, it's pretty awkward, and less clear than saying "life of faith and devotion"

I hope this helps!
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IMO C

what is antecedent of "his" in D ??

Thanks Sir

The pronoun "his" has to refer to a male of some sort, and "Racine" is the only option. Sure, "his" refers to the possessive version of the noun ("Racine's") in (B), (D), and (E), but that's completely fine: the possessive pronoun "his" can have either the possessive ("Racine's") or non-possessive ("Racine") version as its antecedent.

For more on the other differences between (C) and (D), please see my post above.

I hope this helps!


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