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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does the moon symbolize?
(a) Intellectual vision that is defective
(b) An eye that sees only what it chooses.
(c) The eye of God
(d) The vision of those in power.

2. Why does Mary Rambo want to take the narrator home?
(a) To take care of him
(b) She needs the company
(c) She is in love with him
(d) To take advantage of him

3. How does the narrator's grandfather regard his own meekness?
(a) He considers himself a traitor.
(b) He is proud of his choices.
(c) He considers himself a coward.
(d) He considers himself a victim

4. How is the narrator's invisibility related to his residence?
(a) He lives in a building for whites and uses their electricity because they cannot conceive of his presence.
(b) He is able to come and go without being noticed.
(c) The whites allow him to stay there because they consider him unimportant.
(d) The white residents simply ignore him.

5. What does the man in Emerson's office imply after reading the letter given him by the narrator?
(a) That the narrator is in fact someone else.
(b) That the narrator wrote the letters himself
(c) That that narrator has already seen Mr. Emerson.
(d) That Mr. Emerson is the wrong person to help the narrator.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is most unusual about the narrator's residence?

2. What had Mr. Trueblood done prior to his disgrace?

3. Why is the narrator offended by the man behind the drugstore counter?

4. What is ironic about Trueblood's situation?

5. What, ironically, makes the narrator's white bosses distrustful of him?

Short Essay Questions

1. How was the narrator's graduation speech a betrayal of black people?

2. Why does the drug store have the pork chop and grits special?

3. What mistake does the veteran doctor predict the narrator will make?

4. What surprises the narrator upon his arrival in Harlem?

5. What is the objective of Rev. Barbee's sermon?

6. What does Ellison mean when he says that for African Americans, all wars are "wars within wars."

7. What does Mary Rambo want the narrator to do?

8. Explain the irony of the sign "Keep American Pure with Liberty Paints."

9. Who are the sleeping ones?

10. What does Ellison mean by "benign neglect"?

(see the answer keys)

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