The Interview Class 12 Notes: Summary, Themes and Quotes

These revision notes for Flamingo Chapter 7, “The Interview” give you the whole chapter in a form you can revise from quickly: a part-wise summary, Umberto Eco’s key ideas, themes with evidence, the writers who attacked the interview, ready-to-quote lines, the linkers and signallers language section, and pointers for every textbook question. The notes follow the 2026-27 session.

The chapter is not one continuous text — treat it as two. Part I is Christopher Silvester’s introduction to an anthology of interviews; Part II is Mukund Padmanabhan’s interview with Umberto Eco for The Hindu. Keeping those halves separate clears up most of the common mistakes students make.

How This Chapter Is Built: Two Texts, One Genre

Before any analysis, fix the chapter’s structure, because it explains everything else:

• Part I (p. 66): an extract from the introduction Christopher Silvester wrote for The Penguin Book of Interviews, An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day. Silvester is a historian who studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and worked as a reporter for Private Eye for ten years (NCERT, p. 66).
• Part II (p. 68): an extract from an interview of Umberto Eco conducted by Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu. Eco taught at the University of Bologna and was famous as a scholar of semiotics — the study of signs (NCERT, p. 68).

The NCERT theme and sub-theme labels are (NCERT, pp. 73–74):

• Theme: the interview as a communication genre.
• Sub-theme: an excerpt from an interview with an author.

If you want to verify the original text while revising, the chapter appears in the official NCERT Flamingo PDF at ncert.nic.in.

For the rest of the book, our Class 12 English notes cover the other Flamingo chapters — including Poets and Pancakes, Indigo and the poem My Mother at Sixty-Six — inside the larger Class 12 notes hub of our CBSE notes index.

Part I: Celebrated as Art, Despised as Intrusion

The interview was invented a little over 130 years ago, and it has become a commonplace of journalism: almost every literate person has read one, and thousands of celebrities have been interviewed, many repeatedly (NCERT, p. 66). That reach produces a sharp split in opinion.

• The defenders’ claim: in its highest form the interview is “a source of truth” and, in its practice, “an art” (NCERT, p. 66).
• The critics’ fear: celebrities who see themselves as victims call it an unwarranted intrusion that diminishes them — like the primitive-culture belief that photographing a person steals that person’s soul (NCERT, p. 66).

Five famous writers line up against the interview, and most of their stances carry a built-in irony:

Against all five, Denis Brian makes the positive case: “These days, more than at any other time, our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are through interviews.” Because “almost everything of moment reaches us through one man asking questions of another”, the interviewer, Brian concludes, “holds a position of unprecedented power and influence” (NCERT, p. 67).

That line is the hinge of the chapter: critics fear the interview, yet the medium is too useful to abandon.

Memory device — Never Call Kipling Well-Behaved. The initials N-C-K-W-B are the order in which the five critics appear: Naipaul, Carroll, Kipling, Wells, Bellow.

The sentence also holds the chapter’s best joke: Kipling, the least well-behaved of the five, condemned interviews as a criminal assault while quietly committing the same “assault” on Mark Twain years before (p. 67).

Part II: Mukund Padmanabhan’s Interview with Umberto Eco

Part II is not a story; it is a conversation. Compress it into five conceptual blocks and you have the whole interview.

1. The scholar who became a superstar. Before any novel, Eco was a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna with a formidable reputation in literary interpretation and medieval aesthetics; his output — literary fiction, academic texts, essays, children’s books, newspaper articles — is “staggeringly large and wide-ranging” (NCERT, p. 68).

In 1980 The Name of the Rose made him an intellectual superstar; the chapter reports sales of more than 10 million copies, and later the interview puts the range between 10 and 15 million (NCERT, pp. 68, 70).

2. “I work in empty spaces” (NCERT, pp. 68–69). Eco’s productivity secret is the interstice — an empty gap in ordinary life. He opens with a playful image: eliminate the empty spaces from all the atoms of the universe and the universe shrinks to the size of his fist. Human life has the same empty spaces.

If you ride the elevator up to his flat, the time he spends waiting for you is an interstice — and in that wait, he jokes, he has already written an article. That is why Mukund’s next line, “Not everyone can do that of course”, is the natural one to ask.

3. Narrative scholarship, learned at 22. His academic writing departs from the normal “depersonalised” and “dry and boring” style because he tells the story of the research — including trials and errors. The lesson came at his first doctoral defence in Italy, when a professor pointed out this unusual quality and then published the dissertation anyway (NCERT, p. 69).

That early praise is why his essays carry a narrative aspect — and probably why he began writing novels so late, “at the age of 50, more or less”. The chapter contrasts him with his friend Roland Barthes, who was always frustrated at being an essayist and “died before he could” write a novel.

Eco felt no such frustration: “I started writing novels by accident. I had nothing to do one day and so I started” (NCERT, p. 69).

4. A professor first, a novelist on Sundays. Asked whether it bothers him that the public calls him a novelist, Eco answers “Yes”. His self-description is the line used as the section’s epigraph: “I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays” (NCERT, p. 68). He attends academic conferences, not meetings of writers’ clubs — “I identify myself with the academic community”.

Still, he shrugs off the label partly because novels reach a far larger audience: “I cannot expect to have one million readers with stuff on semiotics” (NCERT, p. 70). The same exchange corrects the interview’s numbers: Mukund counts five novels against more than twenty scholarly works; Eco corrects him — “Over 40” (NCERT, p. 70).

5. The success of The Name of the Rose is a mystery. The novel is “a detective yarn at one level” that also enters metaphysics, theology and medieval history — yet it found a mass audience. Eco says journalists and publishers are the puzzled ones, because they assume people want trash and avoid difficult reading.

His counters: there are six billion people on Earth; ten to fifteen million copies is “only a small percentage of readers”; and even he, at 9 pm after dinner, watches “Miami Vice” or “Emergency Room” — easy entertainment, but not all day (NCERT, p. 70).

Then comes the decisive anecdote: his American publisher loved the book yet expected no more than 3,000 copies in a country “where nobody has seen a cathedral or studies Latin”, so the advance was set for 3,000 copies — but the book sold two or three million in the US alone (NCERT, p. 71).

Many medieval novels existed before his, so the setting alone cannot be the reason. His conclusion: “I think the success of the book is a mystery. Nobody can predict it” — and timing mattered, because ten years earlier or later it would not have been the same (NCERT, p. 71).

Notice how Mukund’s questions grow out of Eco’s answers: the interviewer repeats Eco’s own words back to him instead of jumping to a prepared list. That is not an accident — it is the chapter’s language lesson on linkers and signallers, covered below (NCERT, pp. 72–73).

Themes: The Interview as Communication, Power and Privacy

The NCERT theme label is “the interview as a communication genre”, with the sub-theme “an excerpt from an interview with an author” (NCERT, pp. 73–74). Five themes carry the chapter, each supported by its own evidence.

Key People in the Chapter and Their Exact Words

Because this is non-fiction, the “characters” are real people, and every answer should tie them to an action or a quoted line. The NCERT footnotes supply the brief biographies (pp. 66–67).

Quotes That Carry the Chapter

Revise from this table directly — every line is short enough to memorise, and each comes with the point it proves. The page numbers let you find the line quickly in the textbook.

Literary Devices in The Interview

Four prose devices can be named and quoted directly from the text. For each, quote the line, name the device, then explain how it works.

• Metaphor: “thumbprints on his windpipe” (NCERT, p. 67). Bellow compares the interview, using ‘like’, to thumbprints on his windpipe — the questioning feels as if it squeezes the breath out of him.
• Analogy: the primitive-culture belief that a photograph steals the soul (NCERT, p. 66). As the photograph steals an inner self, so an interview, in the critics’ view, steals part of a celebrity — the analogy makes an abstract fear vivid.
• Hyperbole: Kipling calling the interview “a crime” and “an assault” (NCERT, p. 67). A conversation cannot literally be a criminal assault; the exaggeration communicates his fury. The line becomes even stronger when we remember he had interviewed Mark Twain himself.
• Comparison: Eco’s playful parallel between empty spaces in the universe and the interstices of daily life (NCERT, pp. 68–69). Just as removing atomic empty space would shrink the universe to a fist, the unused minutes of a day are real, usable space — the comparison makes an abstract idea concrete and memorable.

Linkers and Signallers: What Holds the Interview Together

The chapter’s language focus has two terms (NCERT, pp. 72–73):

• Linkers create cohesion between utterances. They work in two ways — reference pronouns such as ‘that’, ‘this’, ‘which’ that point back to an earlier word, and repetition of the same word or idea.
• Signallers prepare the listener for a topic shift — a phrase that announces “something new is coming”.

The textbook makes the general point: linkers matter in all continuous stretches of text, and they matter especially in a structured conversation like an interview (NCERT, p. 73).

Where you meet this outside the textbook: a long-form podcast stays listenable for exactly this reason. The best hosts refer back to the guest’s last line (linkers) and flag each new subject before jumping to it (signallers — often the very phrase “which brings me to …”).

You can use the same devices in your own long answers: chain each paragraph to the previous one by repeating a key term, and open a new argument with a signaller such as “Having looked at X, let me now consider Y”.

Textbook Questions: Answer Pointers for Each Question

These are answer frameworks — the claim to make and the evidence to cite — not full model essays. All five questions of “Understanding the text” are on NCERT, p. 71; “Talking about the text” runs across pp. 71–72.

Talking about the text (NCERT, pp. 71–72): the three discussion prompts — recalling an interview you have watched or read, choosing print, radio or television as the best medium, and judging whether interviewers violate a celebrity’s right to privacy — are opinion questions, but a strong answer supports its opinion with this chapter’s material.

Use Part I for the privacy debate (Kipling’s “assault”, the photograph-soul analogy) and Part II as your example of a successful interview. For the medium question, note that the Eco interview exists in print, yet his spoken style — jokes, laughter, asides — hints at what radio or television could add.

Common Mistakes Students Make in This Chapter

Misconception autopsy: one chapter, two separate texts

Most answers go wrong before the essay even starts, by treating “The Interview” as one continuous text with one author. It is two texts. Part I is Christopher Silvester’s introduction to his Penguin anthology of interviews; Part II is Mukund Padmanabhan’s interview with Umberto Eco, first published in The Hindu (NCERT, pp. 66, 68).

Confusing the two weakens an answer because it misattributes quotes: Kipling’s “assault” belongs to Silvester’s essay, while “I work in empty spaces” belongs to the interview. One is a writer arguing about a genre; the other is a practitioner answering questions inside that genre.

Keep the two bylines and the two genres separate and the whole chapter falls into place.

Exam Notes: Framing Complete Answers and the Report Task

Three-part answer structure: claim, evidence, inference

Use this structure for every inference question in the chapter. The cleanest model is the first textbook question — “Do you think Umberto Eco likes being interviewed?” (NCERT, p. 71). A complete answer has three layers:

1. Claim: state your position plainly — Eco engages with the interview willingly.
2. Evidence: cite what the text shows — he volunteers material the interviewer did not ask for, including the universe-and-atoms thought experiment, the elevator story with its joke about writing an article during the wait, the tale of his doctoral defence, and the “Chinese wise man” anecdote about his publisher; the transcript also records his laughter (Laughs).
3. Inference: explain what the evidence implies — a writer who felt “wounded” by interviews, in Naipaul’s phrase, would not perform so openly. Eco’s comfort matches a professor used to explaining ideas (NCERT, pp. 68–71).

From interview to report: keep, cut, convert (NCERT, p. 73)

The Writing task imagines that the newspaper could not print the interview verbatim and needed a short report with only the salient points (NCERT, p. 73). The conversion runs on three operations:

• Keep: the few claims that carry meaning — who Eco is, the interstices idea, the narrative style, his identity, the mystery of success.
• Cut: repetition, digressions such as the “Chinese wise man” framing, pleasantries, and stage directions like laughter.
• Convert: move direct quoted speech into third-person reported speech — pronouns change (“I” becomes “he”), and tenses usually step back into the past.

Practice model (invented for this page — not from the textbook)

Original Q&A:

Interviewer: You have called yourself a professor who writes novels on Sundays. Does the label “novelist” bother you anymore?

Eco: Not really. The novels reach readers my seminars never will.

Interviewer: And you still find writing time in the gaps of the day?

Eco: Exactly — the elevator waits I told you about.

Converted report (two sentences):

In an interview, Umberto Eco said that he no longer minded being called a novelist, because his novels reached a wider audience than his seminars ever would. He added that he still found writing time in the small gaps of the day, such as the minutes he spent waiting for an elevator.

The steps, labelled:

1. Step 1 — Mark the meaning-carrying claims: here, the identity line and the interstices line.
2. Step 2 — Drop everything else: the framing question and the asides disappear.
3. Step 3 — Shift to reported speech: “I” becomes “he”; the present-tense verbs step back (“reach” → “reached”, “find” → “found”).
4. Step 4 — Read once as a single paragraph: no quotation marks should survive, and the report should make sense to someone who never saw the interview.

Things to do (NCERT, p. 73)

The activity asks you to interview a person you admire — in school or your neighbourhood — and record it in writing. It is practical revision of everything above: prepare your questions, greet the interviewee properly before starting, and record their answers accurately so that your questions can follow their answers, exactly as Mukund’s do.

Revision Summary: The Interview in One Read

Part I in four lines:

• The interview is just over 130 years old and is now ordinary journalism.
• Defenders: in its highest form it is a source of truth and an art.
• Critics: celebrities feel diminished — the photograph-soul analogy; Kipling’s “assault”, Wells’s “ordeal”, Bellow’s “thumbprints”, Carroll’s “horror”, Naipaul’s “wounded”.
• Denis Brian’s counter: interviews give us our most vivid impressions of contemporaries, so the interviewer holds unprecedented power and influence (p. 67).

Part II in five bullets:

• Interstices: Eco writes in the empty spaces of daily life.
• Narrative scholarship: he tells the story of the research, including its errors.
• Novels by accident, at about 50; Roland Barthes never reached fiction.
• Identity: “a professor who writes novels on Sundays”.
• The success of The Name of the Rose is a mystery — 3,000 copies expected, millions sold.

Language in two lines: linkers glue utterances together with pronouns and word repetition; signallers (“Which brings me to another question …”) announce topic shifts.

Leave with the memory device: Never Call Kipling Well-Behaved — Naipaul, Carroll, Kipling, Wells, Bellow — with Kipling’s hypocrisy (he interviewed Mark Twain) as the hook that makes the five names stick.

FAQs on The Interview (Flamingo, Class 12)

Why do some celebrities despise being interviewed?

Because they see it as an unwarranted intrusion that diminishes them.

Naipaul says people are “wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves”; Carroll had “a just horror of the interviewer”; Kipling went further and called it “a crime” and “an assault”; and the chapter compares the feeling to the primitive belief that a photograph steals a person’s soul (NCERT, pp. 66–67).

What does Eco mean by interstices and empty spaces?

Interstices are the empty gaps of ordinary life — the small, unnoticed pockets of waiting time.

Eco demonstrates with the universe: remove all empty space from atoms and it shrinks to the size of a fist; similarly, human life is full of empty spaces, and while he waits for a guest’s elevator to arrive, he says he can write an article (NCERT, pp. 68–69).

Why does Eco call himself a professor who writes novels on Sundays?

Because his primary identity is academic, not literary. He insists the line “is not a joke”: he attends academic conferences rather than writers’ clubs and identifies with the academic community. He accepts the “novelist” label only because novels reach a much larger audience than scholarly work (NCERT, p. 70).

Who wrote The Interview — Silvester or Padmanabhan?

Both, in different parts. Christopher Silvester wrote Part I, his introduction to The Penguin Book of Interviews; Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu conducted the Part II interview with Umberto Eco (NCERT, pp. 66, 68).

What is the difference between linkers and signallers in The Interview?

Linkers tie each utterance to the one before it, through reference pronouns or repeated words — “now that is more difficult to explain” refers back to “Which is?” Signallers prepare the listener for a topic shift, as in “Which brings me to another question …”. Linkers are the glue; signallers are the turn-signals (NCERT, pp. 72–73).

What is the main theme of The Interview by Christopher Silvester?

The NCERT theme label is “the interview as a communication genre”, with the sub-theme “an excerpt from an interview with an author” (NCERT, pp. 73–74). Note that Silvester wrote only Part I of the chapter; the theme label belongs to the chapter as a whole, covering both his essay and the Eco interview.

Reference: NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo) textbook, chapter The Interview.

Official source: download the NCERT textbook free from ncert.nic.in.