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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What detail on page 233 reveals that some time has passed since the events of the story took place?
(a) The characters visiting "Oak Street Beach."
(b) Gin saying that she feels "like Doris Day" is watching her.
(c) The "lilac bushes in Marquette Park."
(d) The "now defunct Clark Theater."

2. In the simile that the narrator uses when he describes holding Gin's breasts in his hands on page 234, to what does he compare her breasts?
(a) A garden.
(b) Cups.
(c) Water.
(d) Fruit.

3. To what British author does the narrator ironically compare himself near the end of the story?
(a) Rudyard Kipling.
(b) D. H. Lawrence.
(c) H. G. Wells.
(d) James Joyce.

4. Which of the following techniques is used in the sentence "How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy" (233)?
(a) Asyndeton.
(b) Antithesis.
(c) Polysyndeton.
(d) Synecdoche.

5. In Gin's dream about the beach, why has the narrator left her alone?
(a) After they have sex, he loses interest in her.
(b) They have had a big fight.
(c) He is trying to help find a lost child.
(d) He has gone to get some mustard.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is the author of "We Didn't"?

2. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the detail "the skinny rails of your legs" (235) when the narrator is talking about taking off Gin's bikini bottom?

3. What does Gin mean when she tells the narrator that she knows the dead woman?

4. What is the tone of the narrator's description of people in Gold Coast apartments having sex?

5. What kind of blanket does Gin bring to the beach?

Short Essay Questions

1. Where are some of the places listed in the poem's opening paragraph, and how do they convey the couple's youth?

2. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?

3. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?

4. What is the rhetorical purpose of the narrator's comments about the "bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity" (235)?

5. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?

6. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?

7. What point about the relationship between men and women is made by the details the narrator observes on his train ride home after the night at Oak Street Beach?

8. What does Gin dream about a baby in the water, and what does she believe her dream means?

9. On the night in the lover's lane toward the end of the story, what does the narrator realize about his relationship with Gin?

10. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?

(see the answer keys)

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