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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Part 1, The Seer and the Seen, Section 5.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What folk tradition does Ellison believe the black face figure grows out of?
(a) West Indies.
(b) America.
(c) Europe.
(d) Africa.

2. What is the relationship between Ellison and Stanley Hyman?
(a) Friends and intellectual sparing partners.
(b) Writers who abhor each other's work.
(c) Professors competing over the same university job.
(d) Cousins who grew up together in Oklahoma.

3. As a child what do Ellison and his boyhood friends believe they are to do?
(a) Be whoever they would and could be.
(b) Negros had no chance of doing anything interesting in life.
(c) Negros could never equal the lives of white Americans.
(d) They were doomed to hard manual labor and suffering.

4. What does Mark Twain do with the character of Jim that breaks through the black face minstrel tradition?
(a) Jim's very serious and not at all fun.
(b) He's a complex, dignified and very human person.
(c) Jim performs black face without the paint.
(d) Jim is stereotypical and boring.

5. Who is Stanley Hyman's favorite archetypal figure?
(a) King.
(b) Trickster.
(c) Messiah.
(d) Orphaned prince.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Ellison describe Wright's autobiography "Black Boy?"

2. What does Ellison say good fiction is made of?

3. What does the phrase "to finger its jagged grain and to transcend it" refer to?

4. Why does Ellison choose to analyze William Falkner?

5. What does Ellison believe writing is?

(see the answer key)

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