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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 can the author's grief and memories never achieve?
(a) Giving the author comfort.
(b) Easing or aggravating H.'s past anguish.
(c) Bringing H. back.
(d) Restoring the author's faith in God.

2. How long did "low-hung grey skies" hang over the author?
(a) A month.
(b) A week.
(c) A year.
(d) 10 days.

3. What does the author think it means if human suffering is unnecessary?
(a) That humans bring on their own suffering.
(b) That Satan causes suffering.
(c) Either there is no God or He is bad.
(d) That human suffering is an illusion.

4. What characterizes any changes that the author has experienced?
(a) They are sudden.
(b) He is not aware of them.
(c) They are frightening.
(d) They are unobservable.

5. Why could the author's records not achieve his intended purpose?
(a) Because the author stopped recording his thoughts.
(b) Because sorrow is a process, not a state.
(c) Because the author cannot understand his own thoughts.
(d) Because sorrow never ends.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does the author think might have a special ability for the miracle of love?

2. What does the author prefer to the "feelings, feelings, feelings"?

3. To what length would the author have gone if it could have cured H.'s cancer?

4. What motivated the author's attempt to hit back at God?

5. At the beginning of Chapter Four, what impossible result does the author admit he thought his records could achieve?

Short Essay Questions

1. What enormous gain in his sense of God and of H. has Lewis made by the fourth chapter?

2. What does Lewis mean when he writes that he can believe that God is a vet? Conversely, how is it difficult for Lewis to think of God as a vet?

3. How does the consolation that previously so wearied Lewis, "She is in God's hands", strike Lewis by the last chapter?

4. What choices does Lewis think that people have when it comes to their ideas about God?

5. For Lewis, why is a good God as formidable as God, the Cosmic Sadist? Describe the differences between the two ideas.

6. What does Lewis write that his notes ultimately have been about?

7. What signs are there that Lewis is beginning to come out of his depression?

8. What hopeful similes does Lewis use to describe a moment he experiences one night?

9. What question does Lewis ask to begin to reason his way through his pain? How does this question lead Lewis onto new ground?

10. What are Lewis's reflections about images in the fourth chapter?

(see the answer keys)

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