Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. "Fetch aft the rum, Darby". So ended the life of pirate Captain Flint, far before the events of the novel in which he appears take place. But Ben Gunn mimics those words to strike fear into the hearts of Long John Silver and his pirate friends, eventually helping Jim Hawkins escape. In which swashbuckling novel did these events occur?
2. The narrator of this novel ultimately kills the protagonist mercifully, after he had been lobotomized and unresponsive thanks to the evil policies of the Big Nurse. "I've took their best punch" were McMurphy's last words before turning into a vegetable, and ultimately before being smothered by a pillow from Chief Bromden. In what novel (which was probably inspired by drugs) did these sadly ironic last words come?
3. This character's last recorded words are, "Very well. I will be here at eleven. Good-night, Harry." Then he walks back to his home and has an irresistible urge to look at the title object, which he stabs with the same knife that he used to kill Basil Hallward. Who was this character who was granted eternal youth while his title "picture" grows old?
4. The introverted narrator Paul Baumer's last words are "The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it it there, it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me." From which war novel does Paul Baumer speak these last lines, after the death of his comrades in battle?
5. "Now when you kick off, boy, I want a seventy-yard bout, and get right down the field under the ball, and when you hit, hit low and hit hard, because it's important, boy. There's all kinds of important people in the stands, and the first thing you know...Ben! Ben, where do I...? Ben, how do I...?" These are the last lines of a character that personifies the American dream, a character who ultimately goes mad trying to better his standing in society after the social and economic failure of his children. Who is this protagonist of a twentieth-century American drama?
6. Meursault's last wish is "that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate". He was going to be executed after shooting Raymond's mistress' brother for no apparent reason one day. In what existential novel do these events occur?
7. Robert Walton tells the story of which famous doctor in literature in a series of letters to his sister, and records his famous last words as: "Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparent innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed"?
8. All Lennie wants is a farm to tend rabbits, but, unfortunately, he is a bit dumb, and he ends up getting into trouble even when it's not really his fault. When he starts stroking Curley's wife's hair, he accidentally breaks her neck and kills her. A lynch mob follows him into the forest, but not before Lennie's life is ended with the words "Le's do it now. Le's get that place now." George shoots Lennie at the end of what great American novella?
9. Half-delirious from consuming arsenic, her last comprehensible words are "The blind man". She had tried to commit suicide, but she hadn't realized that eating arsenic would be as painful to suffer as the sad relationships she had lost earlier in the novel with Leon and Rodolphe. Who was this literary character, whose adulterous relationships led to her death?
10. "Mistah Kurtz, he dead." That famous line of poetry, the epigraph to TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men", refers to the imperialistic, cruel character from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Kurtz spends his life enslaving native Africans to make them fetch ivory, and his methods are barbaric. At the end of the novel, he passes away from a mysterious illness, but not before uttering what famous last line, which was repeated in "Apocalypse Now"?
Source: Author
adams627
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor
LadyCaitriona before going online.
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