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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 does the narrator compare the dead woman's hair to?
2. 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?
3. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?
4. Gin mentions her "nonna's cottage" (240). Whose cottage is this?
5. What does the narrator speculate that the lightening across the water might be doing?
Short Essay Questions
1. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?
2. 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)?
3. 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?
4. Explain the relationship of the story's title to the Amichai poem excerpt used as an epigraph.
5. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?
6. Where are some of the places listed in the poem's opening paragraph, and how do they convey the couple's youth?
7. How is the From Here to Eternity love scene evoked ironically when the narrator and Gin are on the beach?
8. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?
9. What does Gin dream about a baby in the water, and what does she believe her dream means?
10. 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?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Write an essay in which you make and defend a claim about the symbolic uses of water in the story. Be sure to defend your ideas with evidence from the text.
Essay Topic 2
Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the relationship between sex and adulthood in "We Didn't." Consider both the characters' perspectives and the implied authorial perspective. Use textual evidence to support your assertions.
Essay Topic 3
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.
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This section contains 1,248 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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