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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. Which of the following is one of the places where the narrator and Gin go to try to resume their attempts at intimacy after the incident at the beach?

2. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the detail "the skinny rails of your legs" (235) when the narrator is talking about taking off Gin's bikini bottom?

3. Who asks the narrator and Gin questions as they try to leave the beach?

4. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' youth?

5. 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?

Short Essay Questions

1. 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)?

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

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

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

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

7. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?

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

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?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay in which you trace the development of the reader's understanding of the story's title. Be sure to consider more than the story's opening--for instance, consider the narrator's use of the phrase "we didn't" when he is talking to Gin on page 239. Support your claims with textual evidence.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about Dybek's use of catalogs in "We Didn't." Be sure to support your ideas with evidence from the text.

Essay Topic 3

In interviews, Dybek has mentioned that "We Didn't" began as a poem. He believes that it still occupies a prose space that is very close to the border of becoming poetry. Write an essay that analyzes the lyric nature of "We Didn't." How is it created, and what purpose does it serve? Support your assertions with evidence from the text.

(see the answer keys)

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