Class 12 English Book 2 Chapter 4 The Enemy NCERT Solutions in English

Q. It is the time of the World War. An American prisoner of war is washed ashore in a dying state and is found at the doorstep of a Japanese doctor. Should he save him as a doctor or hand him over to the Army as a patriot?

Answer: This is a discussion question, and a thoughtful answer can argue either way. As a doctor, he is bound to save a dying man, whoever he is; as a patriot in wartime, he is expected to hand an enemy prisoner over to the Army. Most readers feel that a human life must come first: a wounded, helpless man is no longer a threat, and a doctor’s duty is to heal. This is exactly Dr Sadao’s dilemma in the story. He saves the man first, as a doctor, and then struggles for the rest of the story with what his country expects of him.

Q. Who was Dr Sadao? Where was his house?

Answer: Dr Sadao Hoki was a Japanese surgeon and scientist. He had been sent to America at twenty-two to learn surgery and medicine, came back at thirty, and became famous both as a surgeon and as a scientist; he was perfecting a discovery that would render wounds entirely clean, and was kept in Japan in case the old General needed an operation. His house was a low, square stone house built on a spot of the Japanese coast where he had often played as a little boy, set upon rocks well above a narrow beach outlined with bent pines.

Q. Will Dr Sadao be arrested on the charge of harbouring an enemy?

Answer: He fears that he will be. As he tells Hana, “If we sheltered a white man in our house we should be arrested.” When a messenger in official uniform comes to the door, Hana is terrified that the servants have reported them. In the end he is not arrested. The messenger has only come to call him to the old General, who needs Sadao for his own operation and says, “You cannot be arrested.” The General even offers to have the prisoner quietly killed so that the problem disappears.

Q. Will Hana help the wounded man and wash him herself?

Answer: Yes. When the maid Yumi refuses (“I have never washed a white man… and I will not wash so dirty a one now”), Hana is left alone with him. Angry at Yumi’s stubbornness (“Stupid Yumi… Is this anything but a man? And a wounded helpless man!”), she overcomes her fear, unties the knotted rugs covering him and washes his face and upper body herself until it is quite clean. She dares not turn him over, and then calls Sadao.

Q. What will Dr Sadao and his wife do with the man?

Answer: They cannot throw him back into the sea, and they cannot bring themselves to hand him over to die. Sadao operates on him and removes the bullet, and he and Hana nurse him back to health in the room that had belonged to Sadao’s father, although the servants leave the house in protest. Sadao begins a report to the Chief of Police but leaves it unfinished in a secret drawer. When he tells the General, the General offers to send his private assassins to kill the man quietly, and Sadao agrees. When the assassins do not come, Sadao decides to help the man escape.

Q. Will Dr Sadao be arrested on the charge of harbouring an enemy?

Answer: (The book prints this question a second time, beside the messenger’s arrival.) No. The man in official uniform has not come to arrest him: “You are to come to the palace. The old General is in pain again.” The General needs Sadao for his own survival, so he protects him. Later, when the General admits he forgot his promise to have the prisoner killed, Sadao realises that “the General was in the palm of his hand” and that he himself is “perfectly safe.”

Q. What will Dr Sadao do to get rid of the man?

Answer: Sadao decides he cannot go through another night waiting for the assassins. He tells the American that he will put his boat on the shore that night, with food and extra clothing in it, so that he can row to a small island near the coast that is not fortified and wait there for a passing Korean fishing boat. Sadao secretly buys food, bottled water and two quilts, gives him Japanese clothes, a black cloth for his blond head and his own small flashlight, and teaches him a signal code: two flashes at sunset if his food runs out, one if he is all right but still there. The young man shakes his hand and goes.

Q. There are moments in life when we have to make hard choices between our roles as private individuals and as citizens with a sense of national loyalty. Discuss with reference to the story you have just read.

Answer: “The Enemy” is built entirely around this exact conflict. As private individuals, Sadao and Hana are bound by a doctor’s duty to save any wounded person and by simple human decency; as Japanese citizens in wartime, they are expected to hand an enemy soldier over to the authorities, or let him die.
Neither of them frames their acts as choosing one role over the other. Sadao operates on Tom out of trained surgical habit even while thinking “But certainly I do not want this man to live,” begins a report to the police and leaves it unfinished, and then agrees to the General’s plan to have Tom killed, “thinking of Hana”; only when the assassins do not come does he send Tom away himself. Hana washes and feeds Tom despite her fear and revulsion, and it is she who voices the dilemma aloud: “Why is it we cannot see clearly what we ought to do? … Why are we different from other Japanese?” Their own servants, who see the situation with far less internal conflict, think the couple have put a foreign life before their country, saying they “have forgotten to think of our own country first,” and quit rather than serve such a household.
One reading of the story is that hard choices like this are rarely made through a single dramatic decision; they are made, almost accidentally, through everyday acts of professional habit and compassion that add up to a private conscience quietly overriding a public loyalty neither Sadao nor Hana can fully explain, even to themselves, by the story’s final line.

Q. Dr Sadao was compelled by his duty as a doctor to help the enemy soldier. What made Hana, his wife, sympathetic to him in the face of open defiance from the domestic staff?

Answer: Hana’s sympathy does not come from any political conviction; it grows out of simple, physical human contact. Even though she is disgusted by how dirty the wounded man is and afraid of what sheltering him might cost her family, she is the one who washes his upper body with her own hands after the servant Yumi refuses, muttering, “Stupid Yumi… Is this anything but a man? And a wounded helpless man!”
That single act of physical care is what turns Tom, in Hana’s mind, from an abstract wartime label (“the enemy,” “the white man”) into an individual human being who needs help. Once she has nursed him herself, she cannot simply agree with the servants that he should have been left to die, even though she understands and even shares their fear of what harbouring him could mean for her children and her husband’s position. Her own years spent in America with Sadao may also have made her less willing than the servants to see every white man only as “the enemy,” but the story roots her sympathy chiefly in that first act of physical care, not in any argued belief.

Q. How would you explain the reluctance of the soldier to leave the shelter of the doctor’s home even when he knew he couldn’t stay there without risk to the doctor and himself?

Answer: When Sadao tells him to row to the island that night, Tom “stared at him, slowly comprehending” and asked, “Do I have to?” His reluctance is natural. He is only just recovering: that very night his pulse is still irregular, and Sadao has to check his wound, heart and temperature. Outside the house lies an enemy country where, as an escaped prisoner of war, he would be caught at once; in the house he has food, care and a doctor who has saved his life twice. The escape plan is also uncertain: he must live alone on a small island that is submerged in storms, eat raw fish, and wait for a Korean fishing boat that may or may not come. He is also grateful to Sadao and has come to trust him: “If I hadn’t met a Jap like you — well, I wouldn’t be alive today.” He agrees only when Sadao explains gently, “it is not hidden that you are here,” and he nods “in perfect comprehension.” Then he says simply, “Okay,” and goes, telling Sadao, “I realise you are saving my life again.”

Q. What explains the attitude of the General in the matter of the enemy soldier? Was it human consideration, lack of national loyalty, dereliction of duty or simply self-absorption?

Answer: The text points most clearly to self-absorption, not human consideration or a lack of national loyalty. The General’s first instinct is entirely practical and self-serving, he needs Sadao free and available for his own future operation, so he protects Sadao from arrest for that reason alone, and coldly proposes sending “private assassins” to kill Tom quietly so the problem of Sadao’s arrest disappears.
When the assassins never arrive and the matter later comes up again, the General does not explain this as mercy or a change of heart. He simply admits he “forgot” his promise to Sadao (“In short, I forgot my promise to you”), because, in his own words, “I thought of nothing but myself” while he was suffering through his gall-bladder illness. Nothing in the text suggests any humane feeling toward Tom, or any real doubt about national loyalty; the General is simply too consumed by his own comfort and survival to follow through on a promise he had no emotional stake in either way. By then Tom had already been saved by Sadao’s surgery and sent away in Sadao’s boat; the General’s forgetting only means the promised killing never happens.

Q. While hatred against a member of the enemy race is justifiable, especially during wartime, what makes a human being rise above narrow prejudices?

Answer: The story suggests that professional duty and direct, personal contact with a suffering human being are what lift a person above prejudice. Sadao says plainly, “Americans are our enemies. But I have been trained not to let a man die if I can help it.” Once the wounded man is in front of him, his trained hands work to save him even while he thinks there is “no reason under heaven why he should live,” and in the middle of the operation he calls him “my friend,” “forgetting that this was his enemy.” Hana’s prejudice gives way in the same way: she is repelled by the “white man,” yet when Yumi refuses to wash him she asks, “Is this anything but a man? And a wounded helpless man!” and washes him herself.
The story does not pretend that either of them is free of prejudice. Sadao remembers America, where “the Americans were full of prejudice” and he could hardly find lodging “because he was a Japanese,” but he also remembers his own contempt for the “ignorant and dirty” landlady who finally housed him and even nursed him through influenza. He also remembers his old teacher of anatomy, who had been “so insistent on mercy with the knife.” What allows a human being to rise above narrow prejudice, the story shows, is this sense of duty to life and the plain fact of seeing a helpless person as a human being rather than as “the enemy,” even when, like Sadao at the end, one cannot fully explain it: “I wonder why I could not kill him?”

Q. Do you think the doctor’s final solution to the problem was the best possible one in the circumstances?

Answer: Given the constraints Sadao faces, his solution, quietly arranging Tom’s escape to the small offshore island to wait for a passing Korean fishing boat, is the most practical option actually available to him. It avoids directly disobeying the General’s plan (he never refuses it; so far as he knows, the assassins never come, and after three nights spent waiting for them, the last broken by a crash, Sadao acts on his own), it removes Tom from the house, since “it is not hidden that you are here,” and it gives Tom his best realistic chance of both surviving and eventually returning home, without requiring Sadao to openly declare loyalty to either side.
It is not, however, a morally clean or fully satisfying resolution: it still leaves Sadao unable to explain his own motives, even to himself, and the story’s own final line, “Strange,” he thought. “I wonder why I could not kill him?”, shows that Sadao himself is not certain he did the “right” thing, only the possible one. A stronger answer can argue either way, that it was the best solution because it was the only realistic one that kept everyone alive, or that it was a compromise that let Sadao avoid ever facing his dilemma honestly, as long as the argument is anchored in these details from the text.

Q. Does the story remind you of ‘Birth’ by A. J. Cronin that you read in Snapshots last year? What are the similarities?

Answer: Yes. In ‘Birth’, an excerpt from A. J. Cronin’s novel The Citadel, the young doctor Andrew Manson, newly out of medical school, delivers the first child of Joe and Susan Morgan in the Welsh mining town of Blaenelly. The baby is born apparently lifeless, and the midwife declares it stillborn, but Andrew refuses to give up: he plunges the child alternately into cold and hot water and rubs it for half an hour until it at last begins to breathe. Afterwards he feels, “I’ve done something real at last.”
The similarities are clear. Both stories are about a doctor whose commitment to saving life overrides everything else. Andrew fights on when everyone else has given up hope; Sadao operates on a dying man even though he is an enemy soldier and sheltering him puts his own family, his position and his life at risk. In both, the doctor’s skill and sense of duty, not any argument or speech, decide the outcome, and in both a life is saved that others would have let go. The difference is that Andrew’s struggle is only against death, while Sadao must also struggle against his own hostility and his country’s demand that he hand the man over.

Q. Is there any film you have seen or novel you have read with a similar theme?

Answer: This is a personal, open-ended question with no single correct answer: name a real film or novel you have actually seen or read and explain the similarity in your own words.
When answering, identify the shared theme clearly first, for example, a person forced to choose between personal conscience and loyalty to their nation, community or group during a war or conflict, and then briefly describe how your chosen film or novel shows that same conflict. Keep the comparison focused on this one theme rather than retelling the whole plot, and always connect it back to Sadao’s dilemma in “The Enemy” by name.