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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. What quality does mistletoe have, according to Anne?

2. Where does Eric take his wife on the bus?

3. What caused Ka’s father to lose his teeth?

4. What does the narrator say Eric’s wife smells like?

5. What does Nadine do instead of calling her parents?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Eric mean to Nadine now?

2. What is the crisis Ka Bienaimé is facing at the beginning of The Dew Breaker, and how does the crisis resolve?

3. What do Eric and his wife do when they go out on the weekend?

4. What is Ka’s father’s objection to the sculpture?

5. What is Anne’s family’s Christmas routine like?

6. How did Eric and his wife twist the carnival tradition related to married people?

7. How does Nadine’s call with her parents go?

8. What causes Nadine to call her parents?

9. Whose perspective is the "The Book of Miracles" chapter written from, and when is it set?

10. What emergency is Nadine called in to resolve in Ms. Hinds’ room?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Make a graphic representation of the themes that appear in the various stories, and trace their appearance from story to story. Explain how tightly these stories are tied thematically as well as in terms of details like characters’ relationships and places.

Essay Topic 2

Writing and speaking are prominent themes in The Dew Breaker, as are being silent or losing the ability to speak. How do events silence people in The Dew Breaker, and how do characters regain their voices? Is the novel itself a character in the novel—insofar as the narrator’s third-person omniscient perspective provides the characters themselves with the insight or articulation they crave? What does the novel itself ultimately say for them?

Essay Topic 3

Does The Dew Breaker show us acts of transformation, a kind of ritual change of form, in which one emotion or complex of emotions turns into another emotion, or makes a new composition of emotions? What does it take, to move someone into a new life within their life? How do we know it is new life? How do the other characters know? Is the book itself the only way the incomplete things in the characters’ lives are completed?

(see the answer keys)

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