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

2. What is the title of the poem used as an epigraph for this story?
(a) "In Darkness and in Light."
(b) "The Mirror."
(c) "Water."
(d) "We Did It."

3. To what does the narrator compare the other lovers on the beach?
(a) Sleeping dolls.
(b) Fallen soldiers.
(c) Crash-test dummies.
(d) Abandoned mannequins.

4. To what does the narrator compare Gin's mother's rosary?
(a) A noose.
(b) A belt.
(c) A bolo tie.
(d) A snake.

5. Gin mentions her "nonna's cottage" (240). Whose cottage is this?
(a) Her aunt.
(b) Her mother.
(c) Her sister.
(d) Her grandmother.

Short Answer Questions

1. On page 243, there is a reference to "Casanova." Why is this historical figure mentioned?

2. Why does Gin tell the narrator "Stop" when they are just about to have sex (236)?

3. What is the description of the condom springing from the narrator's fingers "like a spring from a clock" (235) meant to convey?

4. What technique is employed in the phrase "How adept we were at fumbling" (233)?

5. On page 234, which of the following terms does the narrator use to describe the sunset?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. 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?

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

5. 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)?

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

7. 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?

8. 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)?

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 the narrator's comments about the "bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity" (235)?

(see the answer keys)

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