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This test consists of 5 short answer questions and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. As Inez looks through Janet's closet, what does she wish someone had told her sister?
2. By most accounts, Paul Christian is deeply changed by his trip where?
3. How was the helicopter engineer's daughter blinded?
4. Of the following people whom Didion interviews, which is the least accessible with information?
5. In Chapter 11, what does Dick Ziegler tell Dwight Christian not to say?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Jack Lovett's reasoning is most often tied to a given military-political objective he has been given. Didion states that his greatest gift is the ability to view situations with a dispassionate eye. The only case in which this is not true, in which he skirts his duty, is regarding Inez Victor. In an essay, examine Lovett's relationship with Inez. How does his affection manifest itself prior to the Christian shootings? What role do these shootings serve in allowing him to make his move? What good deeds does he render to her, and how does his career allow him to do so?
Essay Topic 2
After the 1972 Presidential campaign, the Victor marriage is marred by overwhelming unhappiness. Write an essay about the marriage of Harry and Inez Victor and how it is pervaded by a sense of wasted talent and opportunity. What possibilities does Inez see for her life that she is not allowed to pursue? How does Harry react to his failure to win the Democratic nomination? In what ways are both Adlai and Jessie Victor products of this deep-seeded sense of waste?
Essay Topic 3
Perhaps the most central relationship of DEMOCRACY is that between the author and the reader. Didion - and her alter ego, the narrator - continually indicates that she is not going to honor the unspoken agreement of this relationship. Write an essay about this relationship in three parts:
Part 1) In what respect is Democracy not the narrator's first choice for a novel? What did Didion supposedly attempt to write before she settled on the story of Inez Victor and Jack Lovett?
Part 2) The narrator regularly uses conditional and hypothetical language when describing events in the story. What does this indicate simultaneously about her relationship with those events and with the reader?
Part 3) The order in which the story of DEMOCRACY is told is not chronological. Why do you think Didion chooses to structure the story this way? What does it deny to reader and what does it provide?
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This section contains 479 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
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