High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Analyzing Irony And Implied Meaning

From the memoir Blue Hours by Adaora Nnamdi:

My mother told the story of the fire the way a magistrate reads a verdict: fact by fact, uninflected, the smoke reduced to a paragraph. She said the neighbors ran, that the beams collapsed at 3:14 a.m., that the dog was found under the porch. She did not say she had gone back inside. She did not say she had carried my grandmother, who weighed almost nothing by then, across a floor that was already glass.

I learned this from my aunt, years later, and only because I asked the wrong question at a wedding. My aunt shrugged as if I'd asked about the weather. 'Of course she went back. Your mother has never in her life left a room she wasn't told to leave.'

When I confronted my mother, she looked at me with the mild, distant patience she reserved for tax forms. 'That isn't the point of the story,' she said. 'The point is that the house burned down.' I understood, then, that she had been telling me the truth for years, and that the truth she told was not the truth that happened. She had chosen the smaller story on purpose, the way one might fold a large map into a pocket — not to hide the continent, but to make it portable.

To fully grasp the narrator's point of view about her mother, the reader must distinguish between which two things?

From the story 'Correspondence':

Dear Mr. Halberd,

I regret that I cannot accept your generous offer of the position at the firm. Please understand that this decision reflects no lack of admiration for your work, nor any doubt about the excellence of your colleagues, whom I esteem as I would my own family.

My circumstances, however, have altered in ways I could not have predicted when we last spoke. I trust you will understand that some obligations, once assumed, cannot be honorably set aside — even for opportunities as remarkable as the one you have extended.

With continuing gratitude and sincerest regards, Eliza Whitmore

[The following was found, unsent, in the same drawer:]

You pompous, calculating fraud. Did you truly imagine I would come and work under a man who spent an entire dinner explaining my own dissertation back to me? 'Obligations,' indeed. My obligation is to never again sit across a table from you.

— E.

Grasping Eliza's true point of view requires the reader to distinguish between:

From the story 'A Small Ceremony':

At the retirement dinner, everyone rose to toast Professor Alden, and I rose too, because that is what one does. I raised my glass. I smiled at the correct intervals. I applauded when Dean Petrov delivered the line about unstinting service, though I happen to know what Alden's unstinting service cost the two graduate students who left the program in 2011, one of them my closest friend. But this was not the room in which to say so. There are rooms for saying such things, and there are rooms for raising a glass, and part of becoming an adult, I have come to understand, is learning which room you are standing in.

Which distinction is essential to understanding the narrator's point of view?

From the novel The Cartographer's Daughter:

Father says the river has always run east. Father says the maps he drew in 1962 are the maps that still hold. Father says a great deal, standing at the window with his coffee going cold, and I do not contradict him, because contradiction is a kind of violence and he is eighty-one and the light through the window is very kind to him.

But the river turned in 1987. I know because I watched it turn. I was nine, and I stood on the levee with my brother, and we saw the water shrug off its old course the way a horse shrugs off a fly. The maps in Father's study are beautiful and they are wrong. He knows this. I know he knows. We have an agreement, unspoken and iron-clad, that the maps are correct and the river obeys them.

What must the reader distinguish to understand the narrator's point of view toward her father?

From the story 'The Panel,' told by a graduate student:

Professor Vale asked, during the Q&A, whether my methodology had adequately accounted for what she called 'the confounding variable of the observer.' I said that I appreciated the question and that yes, I had addressed it in chapter three. I had not. I had addressed something adjacent to it in chapter three, and I was banking on the possibility that Professor Vale, who had asked the question in the manner of a person who had not read chapter three, would not press the point.

She did not press the point. She nodded, made a small note, and moved on. Later, in the hallway, my advisor said, 'Good recovery.' I understood that he had understood exactly what had happened, and that his approval was not for my scholarship but for my footwork, and that this was, apparently, a kind of scholarship too.

To grasp the narrator's point of view, a reader must distinguish between:

From the novel Ridgeline, narrated by twelve-year-old Sam about his older sister June:

June said the men who came to the door were from the bank and that everything was fine and that Mama was resting because of her headaches. June said the phone had been shut off because we didn't need it, on account of nobody worth talking to ever calling anyway. June said the reason we ate beans four nights running was that beans were her favorite and she'd been craving them. June was fourteen and she could lie the way other people breathed, easy and without thinking, and I loved her for it. I loved her the way you love a person who is standing between you and a thing you are not ready to see.

To grasp Sam's point of view, the reader must distinguish between:

From the novel The Long Field:

Henrik believed the harvest would be good. He said so at breakfast, at lunch, at the fence with the neighbor, and again at supper. He said so with the vehemence of a man arguing with someone who wasn't in the room. The rye was thin and yellow at the edges of the field, and the sky above the western hills had that pewter density that means, in our country, six weeks of rain and a ruined crop. Henrik knew rye. Henrik knew skies. Henrik had known both for forty-two years.

His wife, at the sink, said nothing. She had learned that Henrik's certainty was loudest when it was thinnest, and that any word from her would only require him to repeat himself, more firmly, with additional evidence he did not possess.

Understanding the narrator's point of view toward Henrik requires the reader to distinguish between:

From the short story 'The Understudy':

Marcus had rehearsed the monologue for six weeks, and when Delacroix finally sprained his ankle two hours before curtain, Marcus felt — he would admit this to no one, not even later, not even to himself in the small hours — a bloom of something warm and clean spreading beneath his ribs. He arranged his face into concern. He fetched ice. He said all the correct sentences in the correct order: Are you all right? Can I get you anything? Don't worry about the show.

The stage manager watched him with the shrewd, kindly expression of a woman who has spent thirty years around actors. 'You'll be wonderful tonight,' she said, and squeezed his shoulder. Marcus met her eyes and understood that she understood. Neither of them, of course, said anything.

The story's point of view depends on the reader distinguishing between:

From the story 'Interviews':

The reporter asked me whether I forgave the driver. I said yes. I said it clearly and without hesitation, because I had been asked the question forty-one times in the eighteen months since my daughter's funeral, and I had learned that 'yes' was the answer that ended the interview and 'no' was the answer that began a new one, longer and with follow-ups.

At night, when the house was the particular silence that only a house without a child can be, I sat in the kitchen and I did not forgive him. I did not forgive him with a precision and a steadiness that I had never brought to any other task in my life. Forgiveness, I had come to believe, was a discipline. So was its opposite.

To understand the speaker's point of view, the reader must distinguish between:

From the story 'Notes Toward an Apology,' addressed by Devon to his estranged brother:

I have written you six versions of this letter and I have sent none of them. In the first, I explained why I was right. In the second, I explained why you were wrong. In the third, I conceded a few points, calibrated to look generous while surrendering nothing. The fourth was worse. The fifth was worse than the fourth.

This is the sixth. In this one I am trying, and I want you to notice that I am trying, and I recognize that wanting you to notice is already a failure of the thing I am trying to do. An apology that requires witnesses is not an apology; it is a performance seeking applause. I know this. I am doing it anyway. Perhaps that is what I am actually apologizing for.

Which distinction is essential to grasping Devon's point of view in this letter?

From the novel The Weight of Salt:

When Papa spoke of the old country, he spoke of orchards. He spoke of the pear tree behind his grandfather's house, of the honey his mother made from clover, of the summer his cousin taught him to whistle through a blade of grass. He did not speak of the winter of 1943, though I knew — because my aunt had told me, and because the numbers on his arm did not permit forgetting — that the winter of 1943 was also the old country.

I used to think Papa was lying by omission, and I judged him for it, in the private and unforgiving way that children judge parents. I am older now. I understand that he was not omitting the winter of 1943; he was insisting on the pear tree. The pear tree was also true. The pear tree, he had decided, was what he would carry, and the carrying was itself a decision, made every morning, against the alternative.

Grasping the mature narrator's point of view toward her father requires distinguishing:

From the novel House of Small Doors, narrated by Iris:

My sister Constance arrived on Thursday, as she always does, with a casserole and a list of grievances. The casserole was for our mother. The grievances were for me. Constance believes that I have failed our mother in seventeen specific ways, which she enumerates over tea, and I let her, because Constance is easier to endure than to answer, and because — this is the part I do not say — she is right about eleven of them.

I have never told Constance which eleven. To do so would be to grant her the satisfaction of a partial victory, and Constance, who lives on satisfaction the way other people live on bread, would take that partial victory and grow fat on it, and then arrive next Thursday with a longer list.

Iris's point of view can only be fully grasped if the reader distinguishes between: