Print
Word
PDF
|
| Name: _________________________ | Period: ___________________ |
This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. What does the narrator say "usually promises to be interesting" (19)?
2. Besides reading the Bible, what else does the woman spend her time doing in the period of time her story is about?
3. Who is "thinking of writing a letter to the President" (20)?
4. Why does the main character find that the story she is working on is not an easy one to write?
5. What does the woman suspect that the man believes about his blasphemy?
Short Essay Questions
1. What book has the woman been reading, and what story is she specifically interested in?
2. What arguments for and against including the newscasters in her story does the woman entertain?
3. What paradox related to religion does the woman encounter in writing her story?
4. When the woman is riding the train, after the hurricane has passed, what two realizations does she come to?
5. In the end of "The Center of the Story," what does the woman realize about the emptiness at the center of her story?
6. What does the woman realize about her religious belief and the calm she feels?
7. 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?
8. What did the woman originally begin her story with that she later decides to edit out?
9. Why does the woman watch the news so often, and what does she hear on the news that makes her feel exicted?
10. How is the story that the woman is writing similar to the earth and different from a hurricane?
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 makes and defends a claim about the significance of things that are absent, missing, or fail to happen in "The Center of the Story." Support your ideas with evidence from the text.
|
This section contains 955 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
|
