View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' social circumstances?
(a) Gin's bed and their parents' cars.
(b) Grass, leaves, and snow.
(c) The condition of the Rambler and the rosary.
(d) Light and darkness.

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

3. What does Gin tell the narrator she is afraid of when they are lying on the beach together?
(a) Him leaving her.
(b) Getting pregnant.
(c) Someone seeing them having sex.
(d) Her parents finding out.

4. What is the tone of the narrator's description of people in Gold Coast apartments having sex?
(a) Effusive.
(b) Ghoulish.
(c) Derisive.
(d) Wry.

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What does the narrator speculate that the lightening across the water might be doing?

3. What happens after the night on the beach, when the narrator senses Gin growing distant while they are kissing?

4. 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?

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

Short Essay Questions

1. 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)?

2. 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.

3. 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?

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

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

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

7. 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)?

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

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 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?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,288 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample