View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Tony Carbo say in response to John's question?

2. How did John's platoon try to block the stench of the dead?

3. What does Claude Rasmussen tell John on the radio?

4. What evidence does the narrator describe for this hypothesis?

5. What did the soldiers say about the massacre at Thuan Yen?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was the report about Robert T'Souvas?

2. What does the narrator speculate happened, in the hypothesis in Chapter 27?

3. What do Sandra Karra and Deborah Lindquist say about John's talents as a magician in the Evidence chapter, chapter 20?

4. What does Patricia say to John when she arrives?

5. What did John and Kathy do after John gave his concession speech on election night?

6. Describe the night in Las Vegas when John found Kathy and Tony Carbo gambling.

7. What did Tony Carbo tell John and Kathy on the night of the election?

8. Describe how Patricia comes to Lake of the Woods.

9. Describe the arrangements John makes for the day after Patricia's arrival?

10. What is the narrator's last hypothesis?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Compare and contrast Kathy's infidelity to John with Harmon and John's infidelity to Kathy with politics. How are they similar? How are they different? Can they even be described in the same terms?

Essay Topic 2

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 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?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 877 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample