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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 is the large room that Karl sees over the balustrade?

2. What does the civilian man with the bamboo stick keep looking at and then looking at Karl?

3. What is the name of Karl's riding companion?

4. By the time dinner is over, how does Karl feel about Klara?

5. What do the text's descriptions of New York and its suburbs most emphasize?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why is Karl on the ship?

2. How does Green's intervention keep Karl from getting back to New York on the same night he left?

3. What is so fascinating to Karl about the desk in his room?

4. What does the letter from Jakob to Karl say?

5. When the attendant tells the stoker to get out of the office, what does Karl do?

6. What conclusions has Karl already come to about America when the second chapter opens, and why?

7. What does Karl imagine about his parents when he is in the office with the stoker?

8. Explain how Karl's inability to keep track of his possessions causes complications in "The Stoker."

9. What bizarre interaction does Karl have with Klara after dinner?

10. How does Schubal's manner when he enters the office tend to support the bursar's version of events?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay in which you create a continuum of Amerika's female characters--based on a single criterion of your choosing--and then explain what this ordering of the characters conveys about the role of women in this text. Include, at a minimum, the following characters in your discussion: Therese, Line, Klara, Johanna, Brunelda, and the head cook. Be sure to offer textual evidence to support your assertions.

Essay Topic 2

Research more deeply into Kafka's works and the characteristic themes and motifs that critics have noted in them. Write an essay in which you situate Amerika in this context. Which of Kafka's other works do its motifs and themes echo? In what sense is this novel sui generis? How do its similarities to and differences from Kafka's other words demonstrate both the evolution of his thought and the persistence of ideas throughout his life? Use textual evidence to support your assertions, and be sure to cite all of your sources in MLA format.

Essay Topic 3

The end of Kafka's novel introduces the Theater of Oklahama--but is there a sense in which the entire novel can be appropriately called "theatrical"? If so, what purpose would this serve? In what ways is Karl like a puppet or actor throughout the novel? In what ways are the other characters often like stock characters in a melodrama? In what way are the settings more like stage sets than like realistic settings? Write an essay in which you consider the novel's theatricality and what relationship this has to the novel's ending. Make sure that as you discuss theatricality in relationship to the novel's ending, you take and defend a clear position regarding whether the Theater of Oklahama has something to do with religion and an afterlife. Support your ideas with textual evidence.

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