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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. How does Captain Delano view the attitude of the black people on board?

2. What was the disadvantage of building the piazza on the north side of the house?

3. Why was Bannadonna excused for the homicide he committed?

4. What surprises Captain Delano when he first sees Benito Cereno's ship?

5. Why does the narrator of "The Piazza" believe the soil is richer around the cottage that he finds?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why do the peacocks on the wallpaper in the parlor seem to the narrator to represent Jimmy Rose?

2. What haunts the narrator at the conclusion of "The Piazza"?

3. What is unusual about the bug that emerges from the apple-tree table in the story of that name?

4. Why does the narrator of "The Lightning Rod Man" compare the salesman to a worm?

5. What does the landscape painter, B. Hobbema Brown, believe about the Marquis de Grandvin?

6. Why is the narrator despondent at the beginning of "The Fiddler"?

7. What foibles does the narrator claim Jack Gentian possesses?

8. What does the narrator of "The Piazza" think when he first sees a single bright spot in the northwestern hills?

9. What does the bug in the apple-tree table teach the narrator's daughter, Julia?

10. What does the narrator claim shows Jack Gentian's natural gentility?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Melville's purposes in writing are both artistic and moralistic. Select a story in which you see his purpose as basically one or the other, and give examples from the story in your essay that support your thesis.

Essay Topic 2

Melville has a gift for inventing language: "The picturesque yields to the pocketesque." The government of the island was a "riotocracy." Find and analyze examples of invented language. Are the new words useful? Comprehensible? Effective? Discuss their effect on you as a reader.

Essay Topic 3

One recurring theme in Melville's stories is the fate of an innocent man in the grip of malice he does not comprehend. Compare two such protagonists, such as Steelkilt and Billy Budd.

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