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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. To what does Ras the Exhorter primarily object?

2. What decision does the narrator accept for the time period that will be needed to clear the charges against him?

3. Why does the narrator decide against using Emma in his plans?

4. Upon the narrator's return to Harlem, he learns which of the following individuals has disappeared from the Brotherhood?

5. Brother Jack wants the narrator to avoid underestimating what?

Short Essay Questions

1. Brother Jack refers to Clifton as Brutus? How does the metaphor fit the situation?

2. Identify several mistakes that the narrator makes in his first assigned speech in Harlem.

3. Why does Brother Jack defend the narrator at this point?

4. How does Emma's conversation create a sense of foreboding?

5. What does Brother Jack really want the narrator to avoid doing?

6. Why is the narrator's funeral oration more moving than if he had planned a speech based according to party guidelines?

7. What strikes the narrator as the profound truth about the riot?

8. Explain the irony of the figurine owned by Mary.

9. Why does Jack become angry with the man who asks the narrator to sing a "spiritual"?

10. To what does Brother Tarp attribute the warning letter?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Early in the novel, the narrator endures a non-surgical pre-frontal lobotomy that is supposed to erase his memories, make him a more pliable worker, and prevent him from bringing charges against the factory. He does change after the experience, but not exactly in the way usually expected of a lobotomy. Discuss the changes that begin taking place. What changes are permanent? What changes seem to occur gradually? Do they make the narrator a better man?

Essay Topic 2

Someone has said that heresy is simply truth carried to an extreme. Explain, therefore, how either diversity or unity could be carried to an extreme, misused, and thus become heretical.

Essay Topic 3

The African American people--at whatever geographic location they are found in the novel--seem to have little hope of a future that is equal to the whites in terms of wealth, status, education, or upward mobility. Whether they are in the north or the south, the forces that impede progress have much in common. For example, Norton requires a barely "post-slavery" recipient, that is, someone who needs the help he imagines he is giving, in order for his endeavors to have any meaning. Similarly, numerous philosophers have suggested that we need the poor and downtrodden among us in order to have a subject upon which to practice charity. Discuss several different ways in which this attitude is expressed in the novel. Show what this approach of using a particular group target upon which to practice an ideology accomplishes both for the subject group and for the "charitable" or practicing entity.

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