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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 tone of the narrator's description of people in Gold Coast apartments having sex?
(a) Effusive.
(b) Ghoulish.
(c) Wry.
(d) Derisive.

2. What does Gin mean when she tells the narrator that she knows the dead woman?
(a) The woman was not much older than Gin.
(b) The woman was from her neighborhood.
(c) She dreams about the woman.
(d) The woman is a distant relative of Gin's.

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

4. 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) Fruit.
(d) Water.

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) Gin's grandmother's house.
(b) The narrator's best friend's house.
(c) A party in the outer suburbs.
(d) The balcony of the Clark Theater.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. To what does the narrator compare Gin's mother's rosary?

3. What happens after the night on the beach, when the narrator senses Gin growing distant while they are kissing?

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

5. To what British author does the narrator ironically compare himself near the end of the story?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?

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

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

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

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

7. 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?

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

9. 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?

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

(see the answer keys)

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