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 the wife worry the people from the city might come to their home and do some day?

2. How was the plaque meant to indicate that the property owner was not racist?

3. After the incident with a neighbor's housemaid, what did the man and woman's housemaid beg them to do?

4. What did thieves do to "somebody's trusted housemaid" (26) after the city riots were suppressed?

5. What woke the narrator in the night at the start of the story?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why is the narrator unable to sleep at the start of the story?

2. What were the man and woman unable to insure their house against, and why did the man tell his wife they need not worry about that?

3. What fears did the man and woman's trusted housemaid begin to have, and what did they do in response to her fears?

4. After the riots outside the city subsided, what crimes took place in the suburbs?

5. How does the husband try to assuage his wife's fears when she worries people from the cities will tear off their warning sign and "open the gates and stream in" (26).

6. What does the man have installed in their house to ease his wife's fears and what does the boy do with them?

7. How is the man's mother described and what warning did she give her son and his wife as they start their life together?

8. At the start of "Once Upon a Time," what does the narrator say someone wrote and asked her to do, and how does she feel about this request?

9. What does the narrator do when she is an able to fall back to sleep at the start of the story?

10. What does the narrator realize is the cause of the creaking she hears in her home at the start of the story?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay analyzing narrative voice in Gordimer in “Once Upon a Time.” Include thoughts on how the narrative voice of the story is effective in conveying the story’s themes.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay about the author of “Once Upon a Time.” Who is she? What else has she written? How is “Once Upon a Time” similar or different from her other works?

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay analyzing Gordimer's decision to utilize the frame story of the narrator's bedtime tale in "Once Upon a Time." How does this impact the reader's understanding of the story's events? Is this effective? Why or why not?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 832 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample