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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does Babs physically attack in Chapter 35?

2. Who is Horacio thinking about in Chapter 48?

3. What request do many of the inmates have as they sign their names in Chapter 51?

4. What group of people do Horacio and Etienne watch while they wait to see Morelli in Chapter 155?

5. What does Horacio spread on the ground to protect him from Traveler in Chapter 56?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does the novel end?

2. What is Horacio's state of mind in this section?

3. What does Horacio do before coming to Buenos Aires?

4. How does Traveler's codependency with Horacio manifest itself in this section?

5. How does Horacio settle in Buenos Aires in this section?

6. What two meanings of the term hopscotch appear in the first book?

7. What eerie, somewhat mystical, harbinger comes to Pola in Chapter 64?

8. How does the Serpent Club's final gathering end?

9. Why are Etienne and Horacio shocked when they get to the old writers room in Chapter in 154?

10. Who is Pola, and how does she know Horacio?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

An emotional change occurs in Horacio between the death of Rocamadour and Horacio's arrival in Buenos Aires. He tells Ossip he wants anonymity and develops a plan for his relationship with the Travelers. Write an essay about this shift from sensation to observation in Horacio. What does he want from Manu and Talita, and how does he go about getting it? Whom does he have to use in the process? Discuss how this attempt at dispassion eventually pushes him into a sort of madness. What is Cortazar saying about the need to express emotion, no matter how painful?

Essay Topic 2

The fictional guru of Cortazar's Hopscotch is the iconoclast writer Morelli. Morelli at once represents a lofty literary ideal and stands in for Cortazar himself. Write an essay about the character of Morelli, focusing on three parts:

Part 1) Most of Morelli's texts have to do with destroying old literary conventions rather than creating new ones. What conventions does he most pointedly insist be destroyed? Why does he dislike them so intently? How does he think they mar literature?

Part 2) Morelli speaks often in the novel about literature being a surrogate experience. What does this mean? How does Morelli want the reader to relate to the novel? What particularly provocative ideas does Morelli have for achieving this?

Part 3) How is Morelli a fictional stand-in for Julio Cortazar? How are Cortazar's ideas similar to Morelli's? To what extent is Morelli, when the reader meets him in the expendable chapters, writing the novel HOPSCOTCH?

Essay Topic 3

The novel HOPSCOTCH owes as much to the modernist movement of the the early twentieth century as the era in which it was written and is set. The most pointed of these debts is its use of stream-of-consciousness logic. Write an essay on the free associative qualities both of the ruminations of characters and the structure of the novel as a whole. Which characters engage in stream-of-conscious diatribes,a nd what fuels these? Moreover, to what extent do the expendable chapters often serve as free association, linking to some aspect of a narrative scene and going off on a digression?

(see the answer keys)

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