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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Why do Party dialecticians change the Method when necessary?
(a) They want to stay one step ahead of the reactionaries.
(b) Reality proves the Method to be unworkable.
(c) They are forced to modernize.
(d) History has destroyed all other formulae which claim to be unerring.

2. How were Gamma's interactions with people characterized?
(a) By his loyalty to the party.
(b) With deceit and artifice.
(c) With complete honesty.
(d) By his drive for power.

3. Beta remained bitter because he was unable to see what?
(a) Man in relation to his fellow man.
(b) The purpose of action within a community.
(c) Society's reasons for action.
(d) Individual man apart from society.

4. How did Delta return to his wife in Poland?
(a) With a girl he'd picked up at the Polish border.
(b) Without a single penny.
(c) With a girlfriend he'd brought from Brussels.
(d) Completely sober.

5. While talking to Beker, who is about to be burned at the crematorium because he is too weak to work, what is Beta's attitude?
(a) Calm and detached.
(b) Fearful of his own life.
(c) Agitated and sad.
(d) Malicious.

Short Answer Questions

1. As detailed in Chapter 6, what was the first maxim of the communist rule as it established power in a newly-conquered country?

2. In Chapter 5, how is Beta characterized?

3. How was Delta's cheerful poetry treated?

4. As Chapter 8 briefly explains, how does the State regard the propertied class?

5. In communist thought, where is there no division?

Short Essay Questions

1. How were Beta's stories a fitting insight into his nihilist worldview?

2. Beta saw life only in terms of society rather than in terms of individual man. How was this his downfall?

3. Delta, in wandering the roads in France, met people from many different nations. How did this universal migration prepare the way even more for communist rule?

4. How could Delta, who was not racist, write such violently anti-Semitic material?

5. How does the party's definition of a reactionary reduce him to a comic level?

6. Gamma did not even try to save his family when they were deported to Siberia. How is this a vivid example of the communist attitude toward individual lives?

7. Beta's anger toward mankind became directed toward a fear of self-deception. How did this happen?

8. "Still, it was not easy to become a communist, for communism meant a complete revision of one's concepts of nationality " (pg. 147). How was this true?

9. How were Beta and the people of his generation fallen into dark hopelessness?

10. Milosz calls Beta's reaction to the concentration camp life sadistic. How is this true?

(see the answer keys)

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