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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 3.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. 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.

2. For Ellison who is the greatest artist the south has ever produced?
(a) William Falkner.
(b) Ernest Hemingway.
(c) Mark Twain.
(d) Ralph Ellison.

3. What does Ellison say good fiction is made of?
(a) Fun.
(b) Tricks of the trade.
(c) Eternal truth.
(d) What is real.

4. Why does Ellison choose to analyze William Falkner?
(a) Falkner is a close personal friend of Ellison.
(b) Falkner writes about Negro life with mixed motives but also with great success.
(c) Falkner is a great artist and could not be left out of the discussion.
(d) Falkner is very critical of Ellison's novel.

5. Why does Ellison choose to analyze Ernest Hemingway?
(a) Hemingway sold more books than any other American author.
(b) Hemingway ignored the dramatic and symbolic possibilities a Negro character would present.
(c) Hemingway grew up in Oklahoma City also.
(d) Hemingway was not American.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is minstrel show black face?

2. What musician does Ellison see as the true "trickster" archetype?

3. Hemingway carries on Twain's technical discoveries in writing but loses what?

4. In the essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" what does Ellison say black face allows white America to do?

5. What does Falkner understand about racial social code of the South?

(see the answer key)

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