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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Part 1, The Seer and the Seen, Section 8.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is it that widens Ellison's world in a dramatic way?
(a) Traveling abroad.
(b) Reading.
(c) Living with a white family.
(d) Athletics.

2. How does Ellison describe Wright's autobiography "Black Boy?"
(a) Another failed attempt to pierce the great wall between races.
(b) A non-white intellectual's statement of his relationship with Western culture.
(c) The Negro answer to "Huckleberry Finn."
(d) An angry young man's immoderate tale of delusion.

3. Who is Stanley Hyman's favorite archetypal figure?
(a) King.
(b) Messiah.
(c) Trickster.
(d) Orphaned prince.

4. As a child what do Ellison and his boyhood friends believe they are to do?
(a) Be whoever they would and could be.
(b) Negros could never equal the lives of white Americans.
(c) Negros had no chance of doing anything interesting in life.
(d) They were doomed to hard manual labor and suffering.

5. What type of jug does Ellison believe young Negro writers, such as himself, are in?
(a) Broken jug, leaking and being wasted.
(b) Transparent jug, stuck inside but able to see out.
(c) Small overcrowded jug.
(d) Expensive jug, one to be carefully guarded.

Short Answer Questions

1. What assumption does Ellison start with when writing about Negro persons?

2. What is Ellison's original choice of career?

3. What does Ellison say the greatest difficulty for the Negro writer is?

4. What are the three themes of "Shadow and Act" according to the Introduction?

5. Who is Stanley Edgar Hyman?

(see the answer key)

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