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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 employed in the phrase "and justice for all" (234)?
(a) Verbal irony.
(b) Metaphor.
(c) Allusion.
(d) Litotes.

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

3. What is the detail about how long the narrator has been carrying a condom in his pocket meant to convey?
(a) His blindness to Gin's feelings.
(b) His relative experience compared to Gin.
(c) His responsible attitude.
(d) His eagerness to have sex with Gin.

4. To what British author does the narrator ironically compare himself near the end of the story?
(a) James Joyce.
(b) D. H. Lawrence.
(c) Rudyard Kipling.
(d) H. G. Wells.

5. On the fall night when the narrator realizes that his relationship with Gin is over, what are they arguing about?
(a) Whether they will ever have sex.
(b) A series of Elvis movies they saw at a drive-in.
(c) The drowned woman.
(d) A female poet who has committed suicide.

Short Answer Questions

1. What kind of buildings are on the lovers' lane?

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. 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?

4. In the story's opening, what details are related to the passage of time?

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

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 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. 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. 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?

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 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)?

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

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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