High School Reading Grades 11 12 Quiz
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READING LITERATURE
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PASSAGE
Excerpt from a novel:
There are, my grandmother used to say, two kinds of silence in a marriage. The first is the silence of a shared book: two people in one room, each turning pages, each occasionally reading a sentence aloud that neither expects the other to answer, both content. The second is the silence of a courtroom before the verdict: the same absence of speech, but pressurized, aimed, and impossible to sustain without damage.
My grandmother had, in her long life, known both. She said the tragedy was not that they sounded different — anyone could tell them apart, given time — but that they looked, from the outside, exactly the same. A photograph, she said, could not distinguish them. Neither, sometimes, could a daughter.
When my mother died and my father sat, for six months, in the armchair by the window without speaking, I remembered this, and I did not know, and I do not know still, which silence he was inside.
The author's decision to end the passage with the narrator's continuing uncertainty — "I did not know, and I do not know still" — most importantly develops the passage's central idea by:
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