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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. In the third chapter, what does the author decide is happening to his wife in the next life?

2. How does the author say that people react to someone in a room with them?

3. What does the author think it means if human suffering is unnecessary?

4. If sorrow does not require a map, what does it require?

5. Thinking so much about his grief causes the author to doubt what?

Short Essay Questions

1. What hopeful similes does Lewis use to describe a moment he experiences one night?

2. What question does Lewis ask to begin to reason his way through his pain? How does this question lead Lewis onto new ground?

3. What is the difference between how Lewis earlier understood biblical consolations and how he came to understand them?

4. At the beginning of Chapter Four, why does Lewis decide that he will not fill more than four journals?

5. What does Lewis want when it comes to reality vs. ideas about reality?

6. How does Lewis admit that he goes about restoring his faith?

7. In Chapter Three, what does Lewis come to see about his love for H. and his faith in God?

8. What does Lewis mean when he writes that he can believe that God is a vet? Conversely, how is it difficult for Lewis to think of God as a vet?

9. For Lewis, why is a good God as formidable as God, the Cosmic Sadist? Describe the differences between the two ideas.

10. What human conditions does Lewis admit that he can never fully examine?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Lewis offers a passage in Chapter Four that is full of similes. Describe the passage, referring to the similes. What does the moment Lewis describes mean? How does it reveal Lewis's progression through deep pain and sorrow? What is noticeably different from Lewis's reflections earlier in the book, especially the first two chapters?

Essay Topic 2

Describe the different ways that Lewis considers God. Specify each of Lewis's characterizations of God and what each means to Lewis. With which, if any, of Lewis's characterizations about God does Lewis end the book?

Essay Topic 3

For the first two chapters, Lewis is immersed in emotions, in raw agony. In the third chapter, he takes a significant turn. As Lewis points his ability to reason toward his grief, he begins another stage in the process of his grieving.

1) What questions does Lewis ask about H.'s death and what it means for the whole of life? When Lewis writes about the "problem of the universe," what does he mean?

2) Describe the difference between what Lewis believed before H. died and what he questions after she dies. What is the main difference between the two conditions of belief? What is important about the difference for the possibility of a sane and rational life of faith?

3) Regarding faith, what Lewis believed prior to H.'s death has everything to do with his faith in God and in what he had been taught. How does Lewis think about his faith after H. died?

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