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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 John say about secrets?

2. How tall is Kathy?

3. What does John do after being discharged from the military?

4. When did John pass the bar?

5. What imagery does O'Brien use to convey the scene of John's anger and Kathy's reaction to it?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the narrator's hypothesis in Chapter 14?

2. What limits are imposed on the omniscience of the narrator?

3. What additional information do we get about the night of the boiling plants?

4. What was John's experience of Vietnam like, and what did Weatherby have to do with his experience?

5. What does John tell Kathy in his letters from Vietnam?

6. Why did John lose the election?

7. Describe John's relationship with his father.

8. How well are John and Kathy doing, at coping with events?

9. What indication does the book give us about what really happened?

10. What did John discover when he returned from the war?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Make a timeline of the events described in the book, and then devise a method of indicating how the book jumps back and forth between times. What structure or pattern emerges? What is unique about this structure?

Essay Topic 2

In what way is the John still always trying to erase himself from the records after Vietnam? Where does he succeed? Where does he fail? Is complete erasure possible? Is it desirable?

Essay Topic 3

In what ways are the investigations into Kathy's disappear and the massacre at Thuan Yen parallel? In what ways are they different?

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