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. Why are workers told that it is a crime to strike?

2. How did Delta return to his wife in Poland?

3. Delta would have fit well into what time period?

4. Why is Christianity the state's primary enemy?

5. When a man refuses to become a shock-worker in a factory, what does he soon find?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Rather than blaming these four men for the choices they made, Milosz says they were slaves to history. How is this true?

4. 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?

5. 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?

6. How was Delta's poetry some of the most insightful work being written at the time?

7. How was Delta able to play the game that the center demanded of him--and be better at it?

8. Under communist rule, education is from a strictly materialistic view. Why is this necessary to maintain proper thought among the citizens?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Given the examples only of these four men, what is your impression of communism? Is it possible to get a good idea of both communist ideals and its reality by reading about their lives? Use examples from their chapters to illustrate your thoughts.

Essay Topic 2

It would seem that the exciting and invigorating power of this participation in mass life springs from the feeling of potentiality, of constant unexpectedness, of a mystery one ever pursues" (66). How does this need, which springs up in aesthetic Ketman, drive a man's life? Party officials consider the need for strangeness a relic of the past, but how does this miss the truth of what's happening? What are the benefits of interacting within a bustling, changing environment?

Essay Topic 3

Prompted by Lieutenant Zbyszek's sign in the wilderness of bombed Warsaw, Alpha and Milosz reflect on the man who wrote it. What is Milosz's response, emotionally and mentally, to the sign? Using other examples from the book (e.g., the Jewish girl shot in the street or Delta's life), explain what Milosz presents about the permanence of an individual life.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,303 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample