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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 name does Michel promise to give his unborn child?

2. Why does Beatrice say she is retiring?

3. Why does the narrator says that Claude is luckier than most?

4. What is Dany’s relationship with Tante Estina?

5. How did the prison guard torture Beatrice?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why does Michel say he understood things he should have been too young to understand?

2. Who is Michel’s father, and who is Romain’s?

3. Under what conditions did Freda’s father disappear?

4. What does Beatrice say appeals to hear about making wedding dresses?

5. What is the significance of the title of the "Monkey Tails" chapter?

6. Why does Claude say that he is the luckiest man in the world?

7. What is the action that takes place at Monsieur Christophe’s water station during the rioting?

8. How is Aline failing to follow her editor’s advice in the interview?

9. What are the three deaths Freda’s mother says all people have?

10. What does Beatrice say is the secret to her coffee?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Evaluate the ending of The Dew Breaker. Does it ring true to you? Does it successfully resolve the problems and tensions that preceded it? What would you change, if anything? What are you left wishing for closure on, if anything?

Essay Topic 2

When is The Dew Breaker most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

Essay Topic 3

Does The Dew Breaker show us acts of transformation, a kind of ritual change of form, in which one emotion or complex of emotions turns into another emotion, or makes a new composition of emotions? What does it take, to move someone into a new life within their life? How do we know it is new life? How do the other characters know? Is the book itself the only way the incomplete things in the characters’ lives are completed?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,000 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample