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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 kind of irony does the author use by letting the narrator know things none of the other characters knows?
2. Why is the narrator sad as Odilo Unverdorben gets younger?
3. On which front does Odilo Unverdorben serve in the Waffen Secret Service?
4. What does Odilo Unverdorben dream about as a young child?
5. How long does Odilo Unverdorben work in the Waffen Secret Service?
Short Essay Questions
1. What is the importance of Odilo Unverdorben's childhood home?
2. Describe Odilo Unverdorben's courtship of Herta.
3. Describe Herta's feelings about Auschwitz.
4. Describe the irony of the narrator's impression of Odilo Unverdorben's relationship with Jews.
5. What does the narrator think about Auschwitz when he sees it through Odilo Unverdorben's thirteen-year-old eyes?
6. Describe Odilo Unverdorben's relationship with his mother.
7. Describe the narrator's relationship with Odilo Unverdorben in the years before/after Odilo began to work in the camps.
8. How does the narrator's impression of the killings at Schless-Hartheim increase the reader's sense of sympathy for the people the Nazis killed there?
9. What are the conditions the narrator finds when Odile Unverdorben arrives at Auschwitz?
10. How does Odilo Unverdorben's relationship with Herta change when he arrives at Schless-Hartheim?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Experiencing everything backward, the narrator mistakes helping people for hurting people and vice versa. Citing specific examples from the text, explore the meaning of this backwardness.
1. Does the narrator experience normal human reactions to what he sees, or are his emotions backward too? Can we trust him to have feelings based on what he sees?
2. Does the narrator's backwardness portray pain and assistance in a new or surprising light? What do we learn from the narrator about how people hurt or help each other?
3. Does the narrator's backwardness make us more or less sensitive to people's sufferings?
Essay Topic 2
Babies are a recurring image in Time's Arrow. Cite three instances where babies appear and describe their significance in the context where they occur; then describe their symbolic significance. What qualities do they represent in Odilo's life? In the narrator's? In the other characters?
Essay Topic 3
How does the narrator's attempt to make sense of Odilo Unverdorben's life parallel our attempts to make sense of the Holocaust? Do we live the Holocaust backwards the way he does? Does his emotional experience of the Holocaust coincide with ours? Are we just as emotionally detached? Give examples from the book as well as from your studies of the Holocaust
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This section contains 945 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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