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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. In Gin's dream about the beach, why has the narrator left her alone?
(a) After they have sex, he loses interest in her.
(b) They have had a big fight.
(c) He has gone to get some mustard.
(d) He is trying to help find a lost child.

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

3. What does Gin mean when she tells the narrator that she knows the dead woman?
(a) The woman was from her neighborhood.
(b) The woman is a distant relative of Gin's.
(c) She dreams about the woman.
(d) The woman was not much older than Gin.

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

5. Who asks the narrator and Gin questions as they try to leave the beach?
(a) Curious onlookers.
(b) The police officer with the crew cut.
(c) The ambulance attendant.
(d) The police officer with a beer belly.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What kind of blanket does Gin bring to the beach?

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

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

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

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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