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

Short Answer Questions

1. What mood do the diction and details included in the scene where the police leave their cars and enter the water create?

2. What technique is evident in the phrase "feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs" (235)?

3. After the narrator drops Gin off at her building on the night of the incident at the beach, why does she run back outside and call after him?

4. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?

5. When the narrator unbuttons the second button on Gin's shirt, what does he see?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. 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.

10. 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?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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.

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 narrator's depiction of the female body. How does his language reveal his attitudes about women and their bodies? How does this attitude toward women's bodies characterize the narrator? Use quoted textual evidence to support your ideas.

(see the answer keys)

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