It's Complicated Trivia Game | Specific Subjects & Themes

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. Ernest Hemingway had a complicated life, which led to complicated characters. Which of his stories or novellas centered around the difficulties of an elderly fisherman named Santiago?

Answer: The Old Man and the Sea

Though two of the aforementioned watery choices are by Hemingway ("The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Current"), only "The Old Man and the Sea" has a protagonist named Santiago. "The Pearl" and "Cannery Row" were written by John Steinbeck.

2. In "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", one of the books in C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" series, a picture of what mode of transport whisks the two younger children and their cousin to Narnia, complicating their lives?

Answer: A ship

Lucy and Edmund are staying with their cousin Eustace while their older siblings are away. A painting of a ship hangs in the guest bedroom of Eustace's house and ends up transporting the three children to the kingdom of Narnia, where they find themselves near the actual ship "Dawn Treader". The children then accompany Caspian, now the king of Narnia, on a voyage to the eastern world.

3. What natural phenomenon strikes the SS Poseidon, complicating the lives of the passengers in Paul Gallico's novel, "The Poseidon Adventure"?

Answer: An earthquake

The SS Poseidon is a refurbished luxury cruise liner undertaking a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Lisbon to South America. Unfortunately, the ship capsizes when an undersea earthquake strikes directly below its location. The rest of the novel follows a band of passengers as they attempt to make their way towards the keel and then onward to safety.

The novel was adapted into a movie with the same name in 1972, which was remade in the early 2000s.

4. What is the name of the complicated literary ship manned by, among others, Ishmael, Starbuck and Queequeg?

Answer: Pequod

The narrator of "Moby Dick" (a novel by Herman Melville) is the former school teacher Ishmael. Other crew members of the Pequod are Captain Ahab, shipmates Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, and harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggo and Fedallah. This story that is rife with complications is well known: the Pequod is a whaler, and Captain Ahab is obsessed with killing the white whale Moby Dick, because Moby cost Ahab a leg.

5. Water figures prominently in a complicated James Michener tale written in 1959. Which US state is the setting and title of the novel chronicling the effect of Chinese and other immigration on a region's history?

Answer: Hawaii

Like many of Michener's novels, "Hawaii" was written as a series of episodes, showing the effects of the arrival over water by various different groups to the Hawaiian islands over the years, from the initial settlement by Bora Bora residents through to the archipelago's inclusion via statehood as part of the US.

The main protagonists are the Kee family, Chinese immigrants, with a complicated life that provides the main themes of the novel. Though the novel is meant to be historically accurate, it is a work of fiction, and some feel details were glossed over and romanticized in Michener's telling.

6. In the Booker Prize-winning novel "Life of Pi", what unusual companion did the protagonist Pi have on the lifeboat to complicate his life?

Answer: A tiger

The family of Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, the protagonist of "Life of Pi", own a zoo in the city of Pondicherry in India. A change in government policies prompts the family to move to North America along with the animals from their zoo. Caught in a storm, the Tsimtsum, the ship transporting the family and their animals, sinks, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Written by Yann Martel, the novel won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002.

7. Though "Moby Dick" may now be more famous, Herman Melville made a splash in the literary world in the 1850s with his first novel, "Typee", about the complications of life as a Westerner among the "noble savages". What island group was the Pacific setting for "Typee"?

Answer: The Marquesas Islands

Some of the complications dealt with in Melville's first work are the missionaries' attempts at converting the locals, cannibalism, man's inhumanity to man, and the view of women as chattel by Westerners and islanders alike. Though considered ground-breaking at the time, the novel's old-fashioned views about race relations make it a hard read for today's public.

8. There have been many tales about the complications of military life on the high seas. Which of the following titles corresponds to Herman Wouk's novel about an uprising on a ship during the Second World War?

Answer: The Caine Mutiny

Of the titles mentioned, only "The Caine Mutiny" is by Herman Wouk. It tells the tale of the ill-fated Captain Queeg, whose quirks and foibles led to the mutiny of the title, which was decided by an enthralling and complicated legal battle.

9. Peter Benchley's novel "Jaws" is responsible for complicating the lives of many with an irrational fear of sharks and swimming in the ocean. Where in the United States was the fictional town of Amity, which was the setting of his tale of the great white shark with a taste for human blood?

Answer: Long Island, New York

Benchley's tale was based on a series of real-life attacks by sharks on the New Jersey shore in 1912. He set his tale in more modern times and focused on the shark itself and the man who wanted to stop it, Chief Brody, as the central complications of his plot.

10. Perhaps one of the most complicated seafaring tales in literature is Jules Verne's saga of Captain Nemo and his voyage to the depths of the ocean. In "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", what was the greatest depth reached by the Nautilus?

Answer: Four leagues

The novel's title, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", refers to the length of the submarine's voyage in terms of distance traveled, and not the depth to which it went. In fact, 20,000 leagues is a distance over five times that of the diameter of the Earth.

The actual depth that the Nautilus reached was four leagues beneath the sea. And in case you're wondering how long a league is, one league is equal to three miles or 4.83 kilometers.

Source: Author shuehorn

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor looney_tunes before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

It's Complicated Trivia Quiz

The Four Winds invite you to seas and bodies of water to revisit some of literature's great stories. Nothing is simple about the central themes in these waterlogged tales, whose protagonists could likely scratch their heads and say, "It's complicated!"

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