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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 used in the phrase "the forlorn, deflated Trojan" (238)?
(a) Simile.
(b) Onomatopoeia.
(c) Personification.
(d) Hyperbole.

2. 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.

3. In the light from the squad cars and flashlights, what does the narrator see on the beach as the other couples are running away?
(a) Dead fish.
(b) A dead body.
(c) The condom.
(d) Garbage.

4. What does the narrator speculate that the lightening across the water might be doing?
(a) Setting Indiana barns on fire.
(b) Lighting up the paths of far-away freighters.
(c) Chasing the seagulls out of the sky.
(d) Making sea glass on Michigan beaches.

5. 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) Cross themselves and say a prayer.
(b) Look at Gin uncomfortably.
(c) Tell the narrator and Gin to move back.
(d) Remove their hats and bow their heads.

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

4. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?

5. Gin mentions her "nonna's cottage" (240). Whose cottage is this?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. 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?

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 is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?

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

8. 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?

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

10. 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.

(see the answer keys)

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