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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. In Chapter One: The Big Silver, reflecting on the conversation, what does Deborah say the young woman tried to do?

2. In Chapter Four: Living in Yellow, what does Deborah say she did to the yellow walls?

3. In Chapter One: The Big Silver, what does Deborah say was above the water when the woman came up?

4. In Chapter Six: The Body Electric, who does Deborah say bothered her?

5. In Chapter Four: Living in Yellow, what does Deborah say she saw around her lamp?

Short Essay Questions

1. In Chapter Four: Living in Yellow, what does Deborah say she repaired? How did this repair become a metaphor?

2. In Chapter Six: The Body Electric, who does Deborah say she was annoyed by? Why did this person annoy her this way?

3. In Chapter Five: Gravity, who does Deborah say came to her rescue? How did this person rescue her?

4. In Chapter Five: Gravity, what did Deborah say she started going through? What does she say the paragraph she read reminded her of?

5. In Chapter Two: The Tempest, what does Deborah say she had seen in Brazil? How had she applied this to her divorcee life?

6. In Chapter Two: The Tempest, what does Deborah say she resented most about her divorce? How does she say she thought of her unhappiness?

7. In Chapter Three: Nets, what does Deborah say her neighbor asked about as Deborah had packed up? What had Deborah's family members used these items for?

8. In Chapter Six: The Body Electric, what metaphor from earlier in the book did Deborah apply to the party she went to? How did she apply this metaphor to women?

9. In Chapter One: The Big Silver, who was the couple Deborah Levy said she oversaw talking? How does she say they met?

10. In Chapter Three: Nets, what does Deborah say she and her ex-husband did to the family home? What did this action send her back to?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things is a novel about how the small things of life both make up and allow relief from the big things of life. As it says in the novel:

"Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things (21.68)."

Consider the Big Things and Small Things in Levy's writing. How do the small things make up the big? How do the small things in autobiography and life allow escape from the big for brief periods of time? How does this fictionality of life, in Arundhati's novel, also lend to the fictionality and lived truth of Levy's life in writing and living?

Essay Topic 2

At the end of Chapter Three, Levy says, "Most children who grow up in that story will struggle, along with everyone else to compose another one" (13).

Consider how Levy composes herself in her life. What does she struggle with in her composition in the autobiography? How is the act of composition not a solitary act, both in the quote and her autobiography but a composition together? Who then helps Levy compose herself, as her patriarchal story falls apart, and what composition does each of these characters add? Consider why she is writing this autobiography and how this story is not only for others, but also for herself.

Essay Topic 3

Throughout the autobiography, Deborah Levy discusses the breaking of the patriarchy's story by women and the consequences they may subsequently face. Turn to page 133. Levy writes:

"There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the bluish and blackish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels" (133).

What is the bluish and blackish darkness that Levy writes about here? Use Levy and two other women mentioned in the autobiography to discuss what this darkness is, and how, finding their way, these women walk through it to the other side.

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