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. What is life like for the narrator after he loses his gifts?

2. What does the narrator hold onto, in the ambulance, when he lets go of everything else in the world?

3. What does the note say, that the narrator finds blowing down from Gulliver’s room?

4. How far away would the orange need to be, in the narrator's illustration, to represent how far away Vonnadoria would be?

5. How does Maggie characterize the experience of being human?

Short Essay Questions

1. What happens to prevent the narrator killing Gulliver?

2. What does the narrator learn from the fall he takes with Gulliver?

3. Why does the narrator say he did not try to patch things up with Isobel?

4. What is Ari’s reaction when the narrator tells him the truth of his origins?

5. How does the narrator find out about the presence of the replacement?

6. How can the narrator tell that someone was in his house?

7. What is the secret Ari has been keeping for Andrew Martin?

8. How does the narrator finally break the hosts’ hold on him?

9. What does Ari tell the narrator about the possibility of aliens?

10. How does the narrator get Gulliver’s buy-in for his authority and power?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

When is The Humans most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

Essay Topic 2

What is the meaning of life, according the Vonnadorian narrator of The Humans? How does he arrive at this definition?

Essay Topic 3

Matt Haig seems to delight in describing people as aliens, even in allowing his narrator to all but confess that he is an alien. What is the effect of this language in the novel, and what does this technique show us about regular people and daily life?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,059 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample