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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. How old is Rowan as the novel begins?

2. What name does Brahms’s dog have?

3. With what type of knife does Faraday wake Rowan?

4. The phrase that “it was like a piece of gristle in his mouth” (101) offer an example of which of the following?

5. In what Texas city is Tyger’s position?

Short Essay Questions

1. Anastasia notes that the site of the Mortality Memorial is “a city underserved by the scythedom” because it “was too macabre for them” and “in very poor taste” (45). Why would scythes, whose work is in killing people, find celebrations of death macabre and in poor taste, per the novel?

2. The novel notes Rowan’s work “while others prepared for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday” (53), as well as marking other holidays throughout the year (Christmas is mentioned, among others). What does the denotation of what holidays are celebrated suggest about the culture of the narrative milieu?

3. What reason does the Thunderhead give for not accepting responsibility for dealing death?

4. What reasons does Scythe Constantine give for the scythedom’s efforts to protect Anastasia when she is excused from gleaning?

5. Why is it irony, as the Thunderhead remarks, “that with no body, the world itself becomes [its] body” (75)?

6. Contrast the requirements for entering scythedom and for becoming a Nimbus agent.

7. In his expulsion hearing, Greyson works “to seamlessly begin to paint a convincing fiction” (93-94). What is the primary rhetorical appeal he makes in his presentation, and how is it enacted?

8. Rowan notes that “imagination had atrophied.…become vestigial and pointless, like the appendix—which had been removed from the human genome more than a hundred years ago” (15). What does the simile foreshadow will happen within the narrative milieu? How does it do so?

9. The Thunderhead remarks that its Charter Regions are experiments (59). What experiment is it conducting in Texas? What result does it expect?

10. The scythes are noted as having an officer called a Parliamentarian. There is a symbolic component to the presence of such an officer; what is it, and how does it manifest?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Consider the following passage:

It was, therefore, decided that the play would conclude shortly after Caesar dies, robbing an irritated Marc Antony of his famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech. No one would cry havoc and release the dogs of war. Instead, the lights would come up on a stunned audience. There would be no curtain call. The curtain, in fact, would never close. Instead, Caesar’s very dead body would remain on the stage until the last of the audience left. This, Aldrich’s final moment of acting was to be marked by an inability to act in any way whatever (261).

The proposed adaptation is a substantial one. Given the presumed audience for the play within the text, what effect is the alteration likely to have? What in the text suggests it? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 2

Scythe Curie advises “Guard your conscience, Anastasia, and never let it wilt. It is a scythe’s most valuable possession” (191). Does the novel as a whole agree or disagree with the sentiment? What in the text indicates the dis/agreement? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

Scythe Anastasia remarks that many scythes “were so focused on the act of killing, they couldn’t comprehend what went into the act of dying” (35). What is meant by the statement? What in the text and in experience suggests it? How does it do so?

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