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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 the narrator describe the campaigns Tony Carbo ran for John?

2. Where did John and Kathy meet?

3. What does John omit from his letters to Kathy from Vietnam?

4. Who is Harmon?

5. What does Claude Rasmussen say about Vinny Pearson's suspicions?

Short Essay Questions

1. What do we learn about John's character from the evidence and narrative?

2. Where does the narrator says that Kathy might have gone in his hypothesis in Chapter 9?

3. What does John think about Kathy's absence?

4. What is Claude Rasmussen's opinion about what happened?

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

6. What does Kathy tell John in a letter to him in Vietnam?

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

8. Describe John's relationship with his father.

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

10. Describe the setting of the opening scene of In the Lake of the Woods.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What questions are we really asking when we ask what happened to Kathy? What is this book really about, at bottom?

Essay Topic 2

What is Tim O'Brien doing with the form of the novel by refusing to answer the question of Kathy's disappearance? How is 'In the Lake of the Woods' different from the 'typical' novel? What is the benefit of that difference? What are the drawbacks?

Essay Topic 3

To what extent is this book an allegory? To what extent is it bound in time as a product of the Vietnam War? If it is an allegory, what is it an allegory for? What experiences are at the heart of it? What eternal fact of the human heart does this allegory introduce us to?

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