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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. Which of the following does Cyrus have a picture of in his apartment?

2. Who provides the epigraph to the novel?

3. What is the name of Gabe’s son?

4. To which of the following is Arash compared?

5. To whom is the novel dedicated?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Cyrus want most when God speaks back to him after 27 years?

2. How does Cyrus’s mother know she is pregnant with him?

3. Why does Orkideh prize feet?

4. What is the grief leave policy at Cyrus’s university?

5. Why does Cyrus dislike Bluebarn?

6. What is the nature of Orkideh’s final installation?

7. Why does Cyrus’s mother resist becoming a mother?

8. Why does Gabe rebuke Cyrus for his pretense of mysticism?

9. What problems does Cyrus note associate with a focus on gratitude?

10. Why does Ali hate baby formula?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

To what other writer’s work in your experience does Akbar’s seem most similar? What makes the writers similar? What differentiates them? Overall, which do you regard as doing better at the craft of writing, and why?

Essay Topic 2

Assuming that Martyr! should be standard reading for a given class and level, what class and what level? Why that class and why that level? What in the text suggests as much, and how does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

In the novel, some characters are given but one name, while others are given first- and surnames, and still others are accorded names and titles. What significance, if any, accrues to patterns of naming in the novel? If no significance accrues, what purpose might be served by the patterns of naming in the novel? How does Martyr! bear as much out?

(see the answer keys)

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