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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 is the detail about how long the narrator has been carrying a condom in his pocket meant to convey?
(a) His blindness to Gin's feelings.
(b) His eagerness to have sex with Gin.
(c) His relative experience compared to Gin.
(d) His responsible attitude.

2. What repetition technique is used in the story's opening paragraph?
(a) Epizeuxis.
(b) Epistrophe.
(c) Antanaclasis.
(d) Anaphora.

3. When the police examine the woman's body in the light of their flashlights, what does her nakedness and obvious pregnancy cause them to do?
(a) Look at Gin uncomfortably.
(b) Remove their hats and bow their heads.
(c) Cross themselves and say a prayer.
(d) Tell the narrator and Gin to move back.

4. From the context of page 234, what "apocalypse" is the allusion to the Four Horsemen referring to?
(a) Climate change.
(b) Global pandemic.
(c) Nuclear annihilation.
(d) Water scarcity.

5. 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) Cups.
(b) Fruit.
(c) Water.
(d) A garden.

Short Answer Questions

1. What detail on page 233 reveals that some time has passed since the events of the story took place?

2. To what does the narrator compare the other lovers on the beach?

3. What technique is evident in the phrase "feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs" (235)?

4. On the night when he realizes that their relationship is over, what does the narrator realize he really wants from Gin?

5. What technique is used in the sentence "On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we’d repeatedly smeared over each other's bodies" (234) ?

Short Essay Questions

1. How is the From Here to Eternity love scene evoked ironically when the narrator and Gin are on the beach?

2. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?

3. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?

4. What is the rhetorical effect of the diction used in the following description of the setting at Oak Street Beach: "The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed" (234)?

5. On page 233, the narrator describes the girlfriend's mother's car as having "a rosary twined [around] the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs." Describe the tone of this image and explain how it is related to the narrator's later description of unbuttoning his girlfriend's shirt.

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

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

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

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

10. 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?

(see the answer keys)

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