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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. Who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
(a) Mark Twain.
(b) Frederick Douglass.
(c) Louisa May Alcott.
(d) Harriet Beecher Stowe.

2. How old does the narrator say he was when he “appeared on a program with a number of adults at an entertainment given for some charitable purpose, and carried off the honors” in Chapter 2?
(a) 8.
(b) 12.
(c) 17.
(d) 14.

3. How much do the narrator and his companion each pay the waiter at the restaurant where they eat in Chapter 4?
(a) 10 cents.
(b) 75 cents.
(c) 50 cents.
(d) 20 cents.

4. The narrator says in Chapter 4, “I have since learned that this ability to laugh heartily is, in part, the salvation of the American Negro; it does much to keep him from going the way of the” what?
(a) “Devil.”
(b) “Animals.”
(c) “Indian.”
(d) “White man.”

5. What does the narrator describe under the shed in the backyard of his childhood home in Chapter 1?
(a) Wooden wash-tubs.
(b) Animal feed.
(c) Bicycles.
(d) Shovel and plow.

Short Answer Questions

1. What term from the book refers to “the boys who pulled the long stems from the tobacco leaves”?

2. How much money per week is the room that the narrator rents at the boarding house in the beginning of Chapter 5?

3. What does the narrator describe surrounding the flowers in the front yard of his childhood home in Chapter 1?

4. In Chapter 5, the narrator compares the black man and his fight to what bearing the “fury of the storm”?

5. What nickname does the narrator give to the boy in his class whose face he describes as “black as night, but shone as though it was polished” in Chapter 1?

Short Essay Questions

1. How are the author’s teenage years described? For whom did he work and where?

2. How is the first Pullman car porter described by the narrator? Where does the narrator meet him?

3. How does the theme of identity apply to the novel? How does it apply to the narrator?

4. How does dramatic irony relate to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man?

5. What advice is the narrator given after his money is stolen in Chapter 4? Who helps him out?

6. What elements does the novel share with the Realist Movement in literary style?

7. Where does the narrator hide his money at the rooming house in Chapter 4? Where does he go after this?

8. How is the period in which the book is set described by the author? What was life like for African Americans?

9. To whom were African American narratives during the Reconstruction Era generally addressed? Why?

10. What is early education like for the narrator? When does he enter public school and how is this setting described?

(see the answer keys)

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