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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) Allusion.
(b) Metaphor.
(c) Litotes.
(d) Verbal irony.

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

3. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?
(a) It is beautiful.
(b) It is expensive.
(c) It is similar to the Mediterranean.
(d) It is full of opportunity.

4. What repetition technique is used in the story's opening paragraph?
(a) Epizeuxis.
(b) Anaphora.
(c) Epistrophe.
(d) Antanaclasis.

5. How has the narrator and Gin's relationship changed by the end of the summer?
(a) Gin cries whenever the narrator tries to kiss her.
(b) They argue constantly about trivial things.
(c) Gin is not comfortable being alone with the narrator.
(d) The narrator has begun to notice other girls in his neighborhood.

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

3. From the context of page 234, what "apocalypse" is the allusion to the Four Horsemen referring to?

4. In the story's opening, what details are related to the story's epigraph?

5. Which detail of the narrator's description of their kisses indicates the passage of time?

Short Essay Questions

1. 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?

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

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

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

6. 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)?

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

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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