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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 does Therese confide in Karl that she asks him to keep secret from the head cook?

2. What book does Karl's trunk contain?

3. What is the cause of the crowd gathering in the street outside the apartment on the first night that Karl spends there?

4. Why does Karl expect Robinson to be rougher looking than Delamarche?

5. Why does Delamarche say that the neighborhood he is currently living in is ideal?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Karl learn from Robinson about Brunelda's marriage?

2. How does Karl end up having a conversation with Therese in his room on his first night at the Occidental Hotel?

3. How does Therese's backstory support the idea that life for immigrants in America is difficult and somewhat dependent on sheer luck?

4. Explain how Karl ends up losing the photograph of his parents.

5. When Karl is looking through his trunk, what does he realize about the cap he is wearing?

6. Describe Robinson's appearance at the Occidental Hotel in Chapter VI, "The Robinson Affair."

7. Describe Brunelda's personality.

8. What convinces Karl to stay at Brunelda's apartment even after Delamarche assaults him?

9. When Karl is worried about the vomit in the light shaft being noticed, how do his thoughts foreshadow his eventual fate?

10. Why does Karl have a hard time sleeping when he is living at the Occidental Hotel?

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

What is Kafka saying about America through the motif of automation? Where are the most prominent images of automation? Are they all literal, or are there also figurative images of automation? How does this automation both attract and repel Karl? Is the audience meant to feel this same ambivalence? Write an essay in which you take and defend a position on the meaning of automation in Amerika. Use textual evidence from throughout the novel in support of your claims.

Essay Topic 3

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.

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