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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 Doctor's Wife suggest to her husband she will do with the scissors?

2. Who stops sleeping in the main room of the house after the Man with the Eye Patch's awkward declaration of love?

3. Why do the soldiers not shoot the blind inmates as they flee the quarantine?

4. What important item did the Doctor's Wife bring from the asylum?

5. What does the Girl with Dark Glasses not realize?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does the first ward get its information of the outside world?

2. What happens to the Old Woman with insomnia in Chapter 11?

3. How does the Writer go about writing without his sight?

4. Describe the Gaunt Old Woman that lives below the Girl with Dark Glasses' parents' apartment.

5. Describe the state of the outside world since the blindness disease has spread to almost every citizen?

6. What does the unnamed woman do with the lighter she finds among her baggage?

7. In what state do the Doctor and his Wife find the Gaunt Old Woman when they approach her building?

8. What is the result of the other wards having given the Thugs all their valuables at once?

9. Why would the Doctor's Wife's mentioning to the stranger she meets that she is going home reveal that she can see?

10. What does the Doctor's Wife do when she sees her husband in bed with the Girl with Dark Glasses?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Food - and the search for it - becomes a destructive force in the land of the blind, leading to distrust, dehumanization, and sometimes death:

Part 1) Discuss the distribution of food in the first days of quarantine? Before the Thugs arrive, is the process of food distribution fair and straight forward? In what ways are the baser qualities of humankind on display even in these passages?

Part 2) As the Thugs arrive at quarantine, how does the balance of power shift regarding food? Discuss the quarantine is transformed into a Hobbesian nightmare with food as the sole objective?

Part 3) After quarantine, what instances of death occur as a result of the search for food in the city? In the era of white sickness, can humanity be safe as it seeks to subsist.

Essay Topic 2

Discuss the function of water in the novel. Write three body paragraphs about three instances in the novel when water plays an active role in the story. Be sure to write about its function both as a narrative device and as a symbol. Sum up Saramago's use of water as a symbol.

Essay Topic 3

Jose Saramago's narrative voice is unique in its familiarity with the reader and its presentation of the story in a colloquial, conversational format, one that forgoes many of the standards of traditional novel writing:

Part 1) Discuss the effect of Saramago's frequent use of the first person plural - we - to engage the reader as a confidante of sorts. How does this alter the traditional relationship between the third-person omniscient narrator and the reader?

Part 2) Examine Saramago's frequent usage of hypothetical situations - such as that of the Chronicler walking out among the desperate hordes of the other wards - and allusion to proverbs. What purpose do these devices serve in the narrator's dissection of events?

Part 3) Why do you believe that Saramago uses no quotation marks and generally embeds his dialogue into large paragraphs rather than breaking it up?

(see the answer keys)

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