ENGLISH 4U0/E
Mock Final Examination
Page 1 of 2
INSTRUCTIONS
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Write on one side of the page, every other line, in blue or black ink.
A portion of your time should be used for planning, revising and editing.
You may use only the dictionary and/or thesaurus provided.
PART A
SIGHT PASSAGE
16 marks
Read the attached essay entitled “Haunted by Lives Unlived” by David Helwig, and answer the
following questions:
1. In your own words, what is Helwig’s thesis? Briefly explain. (4 marks, K)
2. Identify two (2) different literary/persuasive techniques used by the author and carefully
explain how each is used effectively. (6 marks, T/K/C)
3. Choose one compelling issue raised by Helwig in the essay and explain how it relates to
one of the texts studied in class (not an ISU novel). Use a specific example from the
essay and a course text to support your argument. (6 marks, T/C/A)
PART B
marks
ESSAY BASED ON LITERATURE
30
Answer the following question. Your answer will be a formal, literary insight essay based on
three works of literature studied in this course. Be sure to have a thesis, three supporting
arguments and each body paragraph must have a specific example from each of the three
works. The three works will be the following:
a) Hamlet
b) The Wars, The Great Gatsby, The English Patient or Things Fall Apart
c) Death of a Salesman or Oedipus Rex or Leaving Home
1. “Temper gets you in trouble. Pride keeps you there.”
- Anonymous
Compare the extent to which the characters’ pride contributes to their arrogance, ignorance
and ultimate death in the course texts.*
* On the actual exam, students will be given a choice between two essay questions.
Knowledge
Communication
Thinking
10
10
10
EXAM TOTAL: 46 marks
Haunted by Lives Unlived
by David Helwig
We are all followed through life by ghosts, but
the ghosts I have in mind are not supernatural
beings, at least not in the usual sense. They are
not formed of ectoplasm or electricity or an
altered flesh, and they are not the surviving traces
of the dead. The ghosts I am thinking of are ghost
selves, the lives we have chosen not to lead
coming back to haunt us.
Everyone makes choices, every day, although
some of these are more crucial than others, and at
every point where a choice is made, another
choice is not, and if our life is defined by the
choices we have made, it is also haunted, at least
in moments of thoughtfulness, by those that
weren't.
Robert Frost has a poem called "The Road Not
Taken." which is about this. Years ago, when I
was a teacher, I sometimes presented this poem to
students. There is a line toward the end about
taking the less travelled of two roads in a wood,
and students liked to identify this as Frost's choice
of a poetic vocation. Perhaps. But if the title means
anything, what he's thinking about is the subtler
question of the continuing existence of what was
not done.
Such thoughts can come with very different
sorts of emotion. How many lives are haunted by
huge regrets? If only I had married, not married,
been braver, left sooner, worked harder ... and so
on. For those who feel like this, it must be hard
not to remember Edith Piaf, who lived a painful
and chaotic life and said of it, "I regret nothing." It
is a dreadful thing, regret, that eats away the heart
and must surely, in the name of sanity, be stifled
in the energy of love for the choices made.
But what I was thinking of, when I first began
to reflect on the ghost existences that haunt us, was
something less painful. Even these who are able to
accept the consequences of their choices with
equanimity will be aware of untaken roads, and it
is those that can be considered lightly, even
playfully, to provide an enrichment to our being.
We have unlived lives in the realm of our
personal and intimate existence, but also in our
professional lives. Surely, there was a time when
you thought of becoming ... what? For me, the
existence 1 did not choose Wels that of a singer.
There was a time, when I was in university, when
such a thing might have been possible. I was
offered a job as one of the professional soloists at
a large church in downtown Toronto. If I had
taken the job, gone on studying voice, who is to
know?
But I was a high-strung and nervous young
man, and singing in public --- although I was vain
enough to love the attention --- was hard on me.
At that age I already knew that I wanted to make
myself a writer, and that was enough of a
challenge.
So I turned down the job offer and didn't
sing seriously for 15 years.
That life, the one I didn't choose, does not
exist, of course. I can speculate on whether in
fact it was possible, whether my musicianship
was sufficient, whether I might not have been
daunted by difficulty, and soon enough such
speculations become empty and depleting. Tell
such a story once or twice and it starts to become
a myth, a worn anecdote.
What happened, in my case, is that in later life
I had a taste of things I had abandoned. A friend
who is a church organist got me back to singing.
I joined other choirs, sang more, studied voice
for a while and got to make a good deal of
joyful noise.
How often, I wonder, do people return to what
has been loved and abandoned as an avocation?
The guy who plays piano in the bar on
weekends. The one who becomes an amateur
hockey coach. Things have changed sufficiently
in the roles of men and women in recent
generations that the interplay of vocation and
avocation in women's lives is probably more
unpredictable. Still, I expect there are a lot of
lost dancers in those aerobics classes. The mind
remembers its past desires, and perhaps the body
does as well.
Where does life happen? It's a question that
often puzzles me. Does it only happen at the
present moment, in the place where the body
just now finds itself? Obviously not. We also
live in memory and expectation, and both these
things are, in some ways, forms of imagination.
I can imagine those I love as they were or as
they may come to be. Absent, they' are present.
The moment when those two roads diverged,
that too is now an imaginary moment, and the
first few steps on the road untaken are as
vivid as the first few steps on the one that
was followed until new choices intervene,
new decisions, and the merely hypothetical is
left behind.
We have and should have an intense attentive
loyalty to the here and now. Nevertheless, what
exists in the vivid physical present is surrounded
by a haze of memory 1 expectation, belief,
fantasy. I suspect I am not alone in being
unable, now and then, to distinguish a memory
of a dream from the memory of an actual event.
Both memories exist.
The singer I did not become, the athlete or
dancer or actor you did not become, have an
existence of some sort. Lost possibilities taunt
us, amuse us, and challenge us. The single life
we are given is both too much and not enough.
Even the most singular of us is plural, haunted
by the ghost beings we own and are.