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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 description of the condom springing from the narrator's fingers "like a spring from a clock" (235) meant to convey?
(a) The comical setting of their first attempt at sex.
(b) The pressure of time passing.
(c) The narrator's general clumsiness.
(d) The complex nature of growing up.

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

3. What is the narrator's tone when he recalls, "I was trying to calm your terror with reassuring phrases such as 'Holy shit! I don’t fucking believe this!'” (236)?
(a) Bemused.
(b) Fatalistic.
(c) Acerbic.
(d) Ironic.

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

5. Why does Gin tell the narrator "Stop" when they are just about to have sex (236)?
(a) She sees the police lights.
(b) She has changed her mind about having sex.
(c) She sees something in the water.
(d) The narrator's condom has fallen off.

Short Answer Questions

1. 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?

2. What technique is used in the sentence "On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we’d repeatedly smeared over each other's bodies" (234) ?

3. Why does the narrator say that Lake Michigan "became" the Pacific Ocean (235)?

4. What does the narrator compare the dead woman's hair to?

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

Short Essay Questions

1. 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)?

2. 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)?

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

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

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

6. 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?

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

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

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

10. 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?

(see the answer keys)

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