View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Bartleby respond to the other employees?
(a) He emulates them.
(b) He ignores them.
(c) He resents them.
(d) He thanks them.

2. What does Steelkilt threaten to do if he is flogged by the captain?
(a) Jump overboard.
(b) Tell the admiralty board of review.
(c) Murder the captain.
(d) Seek an unnamed revenge.

3. What makes Moby Dick an unusual whale?
(a) He is intelligent and communicates with people.
(b) He has supernatural powers.
(c) He is unusually small, white, and intelligent.
(d) He is unusually large, white, and vengeful.

4. Why is the narrator not pleased with Bartleby's industriousness?
(a) Bartleby is frighteningly mechanical.
(b) Bartleby is not cheerful.
(c) Bartleby is only occasionally industrious.
(d) Bartleby is relentlessly cheerful.

5. What does the arrangement of the office allow Bartleby to do with the narrator?
(a) Neither see him nor hear him.
(b) Both see and hear him.
(c) See him but not hear him.
(d) Hear him but not see him.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does a scrivener do?

2. What does Melville call the government the Creole soldier established on St. Charles?

3. How does the narrator accommodate the weakness of his oldest scrivener?

4. How does the narrator describe the men who work the Erie Canal?

5. What did a strange boy give the narrator in the theater?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why does Melville refer to Oberlus as "a creature whom it is religion to detest?"

2. How does the poet Blandmour feel about poverty in "Poor Man's Pudding"?

3. What did Steelkilt's followers decide to do upon their release?

4. Why did the two remaining followers of Steelkilt each hope to be the first out of the hold?

5. In "The Happy Failure," what is the uncle's great invention?

6. What verb tenses does Melville use in "The Two Temples" to bring immediacy to the story?

7. What words does the narrator use to describe Bartleby when he first meets him?

8. What are Turkey's shortcomings as a scrivener?

9. What skills are necessary for a scrivener?

10. What is Nippers's shortcoming as a scrivener?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 781 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample