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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) Gin saying that she feels "like Doris Day" is watching her.
(b) The "lilac bushes in Marquette Park."
(c) The "now defunct Clark Theater."
(d) The characters visiting "Oak Street Beach."

2. What is the rhetorical purpose of the anaphora in the narrator's description of the Gold Coast residents having sex?
(a) It forms an ironic contrast with the story's opening.
(b) It highlights the comic understatement of the narrator's response to the situation.
(c) It stresses the similarities between the narrator and these strangers.
(d) It creates increasing tension as the list continues.

3. On page 243, there is a reference to "Casanova." Why is this historical figure mentioned?
(a) He was a poet who wrote about the nobility of faithfulness.
(b) He was a groundbreaking psychiatrist.
(c) He was a legendary lover.
(d) He was a priest who argued that premarital sex is not a mortal sin.

4. 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) ?
(a) Allusion.
(b) Imagery.
(c) Metonymy.
(d) Personification.

5. In what sense is the drowned woman also still constantly in the narrator's thoughts?
(a) He imagines that every man he sees could be her killer.
(b) He constantly imagines her there beside Gin.
(c) He begins collecting newspaper articles about drownings.
(d) He sees her as a symbol of his own recklessness.

Short Answer Questions

1. How has the narrator and Gin's relationship changed by the end of the summer?

2. 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?

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

4. What technique is employed in the phrase "and justice for all" (234)?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. 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?

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

4. 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)?

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

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

7. 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)?

8. Explain the relationship of the story's title to the Amichai poem excerpt used as an epigraph.

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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