Literary Analysis practice questions.

Identify the narrative perspective of a narrator who has full access to the private thoughts and feelings of every character in a novel.

• Third-person limited
• First-person peripheral
• Third-person omniscient
• Second-person

Answer: Third-person omniscient

An omniscient narrator stands outside the story yet can enter any character's mind; a limited narrator is restricted to one character's consciousness.

Identify the technique used in the sentence: 'The exhausted city finally slept.'

• Personification
• Onomatopoeia (sound words)
• Hyperbole
• Metonymy

Answer: Personification

The city is given human qualities (being exhausted, sleeping), which is personification; no sound imitation, exaggeration or substitution of a related term is involved.

Identify the technique used in the sentence: 'The White House issued a statement late last night.'

• Synecdoche
• Personification
• Allusion
• Metonymy

Answer: Metonymy

Metonymy substitutes a closely associated thing (the building) for what is actually meant (the US administration); synecdoche would use a part to stand for the whole.

In poetry, enjambment occurs when:

• a poetic line ends with a full stop or some other strong closing punctuation
• a sentence or clause runs past the line break without a pause
• two consecutive lines end with rhyming words
• a marked pause falls in the middle of a line

Answer: a sentence or clause runs past the line break without a pause

Enjambment carries the syntax over the line ending, often creating momentum or surprise; a mid-line pause is a caesura and an end-stopped line closes with punctuation.

Which statement best defines free indirect discourse?

• Dialogue quoted word for word inside quotation marks
• A narrator who repeatedly pauses the whole story in order to step forward and address the reader directly
• A character's thoughts blended into third-person narration without quotation marks or reporting tags
• A speech delivered by a character alone on stage

Answer: A character's thoughts blended into third-person narration without quotation marks or reporting tags

Free indirect discourse fuses the narrator's third-person voice with a character's inner idiom, so we hear the character's thoughts without 'she thought' tags.

The shift in argument or feeling that typically occurs between the octave and the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet is called the:

• volta
• caesura
• refrain
• envoi

Answer: volta

The volta ('turn') marks the point where the sonnet pivots, often from problem to resolution; a caesura is a mid-line pause and a refrain is a repeated line.