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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 technique is evident in the phrase "feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs" (235)?
(a) Euphony.
(b) Hyperbaton.
(c) Cacophony.
(d) Double entendre.

2. What mood do the diction and details included in the scene where the police leave their cars and enter the water create?
(a) Frantic.
(b) Factual.
(c) Inflammatory.
(d) Reverent.

3. After the narrator drops Gin off at her building on the night of the incident at the beach, why does she run back outside and call after him?
(a) She wants to tell him that she loves him.
(b) She needs to get her blanket back from him.
(c) She want to know if he is going to tell anyone what happened.
(d) She wants to know if he needs an umbrella.

4. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' youth?
(a) Grass, leaves, and snow.
(b) Light and darkness.
(c) Gin's bed and their parents' cars.
(d) The condition of the Rambler and the rosary.

5. In the story's opening, what details are related to the passage of time?
(a) Light and darkness.
(b) The condition of the Rambler and the rosary.
(c) Grass, leaves, and snow.
(d) Gin's bed and their parents' cars.

Short Answer Questions

1. On page 243, there is a reference to "Casanova." Why is this historical figure mentioned?

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?

3. What does Gin tell the narrator she is afraid of when they are lying on the beach together?

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

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

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

6. What messages about gender, sex, and adulthood are being conveyed in the phrase "entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life," which the narrator uses to describe his beliefs about what is happening on the beach that night?

7. 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)?

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 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?

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

(see the answer keys)

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