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. In the prologue, what color is the girl's dress?

2. What does the Kid have instead of hands?

3. In the italicized section of Chapter 4, what does the girl say that photons are not?

4. In the non-italicized section of Chapter 3, what does Bobby find out happened to Oiler.

5. In the italicized section of Chapter 4, what does Mr. Bones suspect that the girl is suffering a bout of?

Short Essay Questions

1. Of the Kid's cohorts, who is the only one that the girl cares about? Why does the kid not summon her for the girl?

2. What are Bobby and Oiler doing off the coast of Mississippi as the non-italicized section of Chapter 1 opens?

3. How does the Kid feel about almost all the acts that he brings up? How does he generally end them that gives a clue as to how he feels?

4. Before the girl ends her life in the Wisconsin woods, who comes to see her a final time in her room in Chicago?

5. How does the Kid talk? What is the reader's impression of the Kid from the ways he talks and the language that he uses.

6. Does Bobby find anything on his search of the cluster of islands?

7. What is peculiar about this downed plane?

8. What happens to Bobby that ends his time racing cars?

9. What does Bobby find in his paternal grandmother's basement after her funeral?

10. What does Debussy go home to tell her mother about?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is the structure of each chapter? Why does the author structure the story in the way that he does? How does this structure support the overall feel of the book?

Essay Topic 2

Alicia talks about the deep heart of number and the separation between the source of a mathematical conjecture's creation and the value of a mathematical conjecture once it is written down. She says that if left unwritten, a mathematical conjecture may provide some insight into the deep core of reality. What is the paradox of something separate from reality being able to explain reality? How is that connected to conscious and the subconscious? Between Alicia who tries to make sense and the Kid who tries to make unsense?

Essay Topic 3

There are guys in suits who question Bobby, and his bank account is frozen by the IRS. How do these elements serve the story? How do they serve the author's intentions for the story? How do they serve to suggest a life that is out of Bobby's control? How do they serve to show ideas of struggle and surrender? How do these ideas relate to the reader's world?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 896 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample