View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Gin mean when she tells the narrator that she knows the dead woman?

2. Gin mentions her "nonna's cottage" (240). Whose cottage is this?

3. What is the detail about how long the narrator has been carrying a condom in his pocket meant to convey?

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

5. While he is on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the couples in the high-rises around them are wearing?

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

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

4. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?

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

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 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?

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

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?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay in which you choose two passages from the story (of a paragraph or longer) and compare and contrast their syntax. Use this comparison and contrast to make a claim about how Dybek uses different patterns of syntax to accomplish different goals. Be sure to support your assertions with quoted textual evidence and to use precise literary terminology to label the techniques under discussion.

Essay Topic 2

Why do you think that Dybek chose to express his ideas about how environment can limit opportunity through the story of two frustrated adolescent lovers? Write an essay that explores other choices Dybek might have made and comes to a conclusion about the advantages of focusing the story on Perry and Gin's failed attempt to have sex.

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the purpose of the shifting moods Dybek creates in "We Didn't." Be sure to support your assertions with evidence from the text.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,238 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample