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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. Why was the woman reading the Bible during the period she writes about in her story?
2. What does the sick man want when he calls the main character?
3. Where is the woman's landlady from?
4. What technique is used in the sentence: "Outside her apartment, the weather was changing: the wind rose, the branches swayed on the young trees, and the leaves fluttered" (19)?
5. What detail of the woman's train ride reinforces the motif of things that come close to happening but do not actually happen?
Short Essay Questions
1. What is the woman's story about, and what is its major flaw?
2. What happens when the woman visits a Baptist church?
3. What contradiction does Davis's first sentence introduce?
4. What comment does the story make about paring a story down to the essentials, and what does this have to do with Davis's own style?
5. Who are the people in the story that the writer is working on?
6. When the woman is riding the train, after the hurricane has passed, what two realizations does she come to?
7. Explain what the "yellow pall" is and what things in Davis's story it is attached to.
8. What book has the woman been reading, and what story is she specifically interested in?
9. How is the story that the woman is writing similar to the earth and different from a hurricane?
10. What does the woman realize about her religious belief and the calm she feels?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Write an essay that analyzes the narrative voice of "The Center of the Story." Use quoted textual evidence to support your claims.
Essay Topic 2
Read Julie Beck's Atlantic article "Life's Stories" (available online). Write an essay that explain the relationship between Davis's short story and the ideas presented in Beck's article. Use textual evidence from both sources to support your claims, and cite both sources in MLA format.
Essay Topic 3
Write an essay that explicates the comparison the story makes between written works and hurricanes. Explain how the comparison is first stated in the story and what it means in that instance. Then expand on this to detail what the comparison implies about well-written stories and the need for stories to "move" around a center.
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This section contains 923 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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