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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. What imagery does O'Brien use to convey the scene of John's anger and Kathy's reaction to it?

2. Who is Kathy?

3. Why is it important that we know Kathy's physical measurements?

4. What is the result of O'Brien titling more than one chapter "Hypothesis"?

5. What had John and Kathy tried to do, that had been a failure?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does John tell Kathy in his letters from Vietnam?

2. What is Claude Rasmussen's opinion about what happened?

3. What did John discover when he returned from the war?

4. What did John tell himself about what he did to Weatherby?

5. What additional information do we get about the night of the boiling plants?

6. What was John's experience of Vietnam like, and what did Weatherby have to do with his experience?

7. Describe the effect of reading In the Lake of the Woods.

8. How well are John and Kathy doing, at coping with events?

9. What do we learn about John's character from the evidence and narrative?

10. What do we hear about Weatherby that adds to what we heard about earlier?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What questions are we really asking when we ask what happened to Kathy? What is this book really about, at bottom?

Essay Topic 2

In what ways are the investigations into Kathy's disappear and the massacre at Thuan Yen parallel? In what ways are they different?

Essay Topic 3

To what degree is this book internally consistent? How much does it follow the rules it lays out for its own unfolding?

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