Vietnam Literary Journalism — Quiz

Question 21 • English Language Arts 11

Which excerpt from Dispatches contains imagery that evokes a sense of helplessness and inevitability?

Answer

Sometimes you’d step from the bunker, all sense of time passing having left you, and find it dark out. The far side of the hills around the bowl of the base was glimmering, but you could never see the source of the light, and it had the look of a city at night approached from a great distance.

One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were.

Nights were when the air and artillery strikes were heaviest because that was when we knew that the NVA was above ground and moving.

No wonder everyone became a luck freak, no wonder you could wake at four in the morning some mornings and know that tomorrow it would finally happen, you could stop worrying about it now and just lie there, sweating in the dampest chill you ever felt.

Explanation

Choice D conveys helplessness through the belief that disaster is unavoidable: the speaker wakes knowing that “tomorrow it would finally happen” and can only lie there sweating. The phrase suggests an approaching event the speaker cannot prevent, creating a sense of inevitability. The other excerpts focus mainly on a mysterious landscape, the immediate effects of a helicopter hit, or the timing of military attacks.

AI-written and checked against the verified answer.

More from this Course

Quiz

Quiz

Quiz