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

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

3. What does Gin believe is true about the dead woman on the beach?
(a) She was an omen.
(b) Gin and the narrator could have saved her.
(c) She was sent by God.
(d) Her death was accidental.

4. Who is the author of "We Didn't"?
(a) Vincent Kowalski.
(b) Perry Katzek.
(c) Yehuda Amichai.
(d) Stuart Dybek.

5. Which of the following is one of the places where the narrator and Gin go to try to resume their attempts at intimacy after the incident at the beach?
(a) The narrator's best friend's house.
(b) A party in the outer suburbs.
(c) The balcony of the Clark Theater.
(d) Gin's grandmother's house.

Short Answer Questions

1. When the narrator unbuttons the second button on Gin's shirt, what does he see?

2. Why does Gin tell the narrator "Stop" when they are just about to have sex (236)?

3. What technique is employed in the phrase "How adept we were at fumbling" (233)?

4. In the story's opening, what details are related to the story's epigraph?

5. On page 234, which of the following terms does the narrator use to describe the sunset?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What does the narrator say might have happened if the dead woman had washed up beside them while he and Gin were trying to have sex on the beach, and why is Gin so offended?

3. 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)?

4. 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?

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

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

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

8. 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)?

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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