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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. How is Jane’s father described in the story in Part I?
(a) “Big and strong.”
(b) “Old and senile.”
(c) “Skinny and feeble.”
(d) “Weathered and angry.”

2. What actress does Claudia claim to like, causing her sister and Pecola to give her a puzzled look and consider her incomprehensible, in Part II?
(a) Katherine Hepburn.
(b) Jane Withers.
(c) Marylin Monroe.
(d) Audrey Hepburn.

3. The narrator in Part II says that her family’s house is “old, cold” and what color?
(a) Blue.
(b) White.
(c) Green.
(d) Brown.

4. How old does the narrator say she is in Part II?
(a) 11.
(b) 9.
(c) 15.
(d) 7.

5. The narrator states in Part II, “The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed” what?
(a) “They were ugly.”
(b) “God would save them.”
(c) “They did not deserve any better.”
(d) “Their luck would change.”

Short Answer Questions

1. How old is Pecola when she lives by the pizza parlor in the narrator’s description in Part II?

2. What does Claudia recall doing with her baby dolls as a child in Part II?

3. What does the narrator say has become of Pecola’s father in Part I?

4. Part I of the novel begins with a story about a girl named Jane and her brother, who is named what?

5. What color is Jane’s dress in the story from Part I?

Short Essay Questions

1. What commotion begins when Rosemary “tattles” on Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola for “being nasty” in “Autumn”?

2. Who can be seen in Part I as characters that face trouble assimilating into “white society’s standards of beauty”?

3. For what reason does the Breedlove family stay in the apartment, according to the narrator in “Here is the House…”?

4. Who takes control of the situation when Pecola suddenly begins menstruating in Part II? How?

5. How are Claudia’s feelings about Shirley Temple and about baby dolls illustrated in “Autumn”?

6. Why does Pecola Breedlove come to live with the MacTeers in “Autumn”?

7. According to some critics, the three versions of the reader presented on the first page of The Bluest Eye represent three lifestyles presented in the novel. What does the first version represent?

8. How does the narrator compare the state of being “put out” with being “outdoors” in “Autumn”?

9. What information is related to the reader in the brief italicized preface before “Autumn”?

10. What foreshadowing is revealed by the narrator in the end of Part I?

(see the answer keys)

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