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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. How does Beatrice answer when Aline asks how old she is?

2. What does Aline taste in Beatrice’s coffee?

3. Why does Beatrice say she is retiring?

4. When did Estina lose her eyesight?

5. Who is the one who starts the others telling stories about their personal lives?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Who is the main character of the "Monkey Tails" chapter, and where is it set?

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

5. Why does Dany think that Claude is lucky?

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

7. Who are Beatrice Saint Ford and Aline Cajuste?

8. What does Freda say her father wished would happen on New Year’s Eve, in the years before he was arrested?

9. Why does the main character of "Night Talkers" get three pieces of cloth to keep with him the rest of his life?

10. Why did Freda emigrate from Haiti to the U.S.?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Writing and speaking are prominent themes in The Dew Breaker, as are being silent or losing the ability to speak. How do events silence people in The Dew Breaker, and how do characters regain their voices? Is the novel itself a character in the novel—insofar as the narrator’s third-person omniscient perspective provides the characters themselves with the insight or articulation they crave? What does the novel itself ultimately say for them?

Essay Topic 2

More than one of the characters in The Dew Breaker take on the role of mourners for the others. What service do these characters provide, and is there a sense in which the book itself is taking on the role of expressing grief for others? For whom? Over what?

Essay Topic 3

Identify the most important plot points in The Dew Breaker. What is at stake in each of these moments? What possibilities do these moments present, and how are those possibilities channeled into specific actions or events? How does the plot chart its course among other alternative or possible plots?

(see the answer keys)

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