51 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel AllendeAnd of Clay Are We Created
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Quiz
Reading Check, Multiple Choice & Short Answer Quizzes
Reading Check questions are designed for in-class review on key plot points or for quick verbal or written assessments. Multiple Choice and Short Answer Quizzes create ideal summative assessments, and collectively function to convey a sense of the work’s tone and themes.
Reading Check
1. What does “Azucena” mean?
2. What caused the mudslide that trapped Azucena?
3. How is Rolf able to reach Azucena so quickly?
4. What equipment does Rolf conclude will be necessary to free Azucena?
5. How does the narrator try to help the rescue efforts?
6. Who was Katharina?
7. Who visits Azucena on the third day of her entrapment?
8. What does Azucena admit to Rolf shortly before her death?
Multiple Choice
1. The sentence, “First a subterranean sob rocked the cotton fields, curling them like waves of foam” contains an example of which of the following (Paragraph 2)?
A) caricature
B) euphemism
C) pathetic fallacy
D) red herring
2. The narrator’s description of the mudslide depicts death as which of the following?
A) indiscriminate and inevitable
B) violent and unjust
C) spiritual and mysterious
D) natural and healthy
3. The early rescue attempts most strongly contrast Rolf’s hopefulness with which of the following?
A) the narrator’s grief
B) Azucena’s resignation
C) the government’s indifference
D) the other rescuers’ pessimism
4. Which of the following passages best captures the role that Azucena plays in the narrator’s relationship with Rolf?
A) "I had no presentiments. I sat in the kitchen, sipping my coffee and planning the long hours without him, sure that he would be back the next day.” (Paragraph 3)
B) “He smiled at her with that smile that crinkles his eyes and makes him look like a little boy.” (Paragraph 7)
C) “I could not bear to wait at home, so I went to National Television, where I often spent entire nights with Rolf editing programs.” (Paragraph 17)
D)“The screen reduced the disaster to a single plane and accentuated the tremendous distance that separated me from Rolf Carlé; nonetheless, I was there with him.” (Paragraph 17)
5. The narrator’s remark that the media “appropriated” Azucena connotes which of the following?
A) disapproval
B) respect
C) confusion
D) anxiety
6. Consider the following passage in Paragraph 23: “Katharina’s scent melded with his own sweat, with aromas of cooking, garlic, soup, freshly baked bread, and the unexpected odor of putrescent clay.” The statement relates most strongly to which of the following themes?
A) Acceptance of Mortality
B) Memory as Agency and Powerlessness
C) Empathy and humanity’s Relationship with the Natural World
D) Media Exploitation of Suffering
7. The pump that Rolf and the narrator try to procure represents all but which of the following?
A) humanity’s attempts to control nature
B) bureaucratic obstruction and incompetence
C) ordinary people’s charity in the face of disasters
D) humanity’s powerlessness in the face of death
8. What sort of imagery does the story frequently associate with Azucena?
A) moon
B) birds
C) light
D) plants
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How does watching events through the lens of his camera affect Rolf, and why?
2. What does Azucena say has trapped her, and why is that significant?
3. What do Azucena and Rolf talk about during the first night she is trapped?
4. How is the narrator able to be “present” with Rolf and Azucena?
5. Why doesn’t Rolf confide in Azucena about his past?
6. What does the mud trapping Azucena come to represent for Rolf?
7. How does the narrator characterize the President and his visit to the disaster zone?
8. When and how does Rolf finally accept Azucena’s impending death?
Quizzes – Answer Key
Reading Check
1. Lily (Paragraph 1)
2. a volcanic eruption (Paragraph 2)
3. A helicopter flies him to the scene. (Paragraph 4)
4. a pump (Paragraph 9)
5. She calls various political figures, military officials, and business leaders about procuring a pump. (Paragraph 17)
6. Rolf’s sister, who had some sort of developmental disability (Paragraph 23)
7. the president (Paragraph 26)
8. that she’s sad to die without knowing a boy’s love (Paragraph 27)
Multiple Choice
1. C (Paragraph 2)
2. A (Paragraphs 1-2)
3. B (Paragraphs 5-15)
4. D (Paragraph 17)
5. A (Paragraph 19)
6. B (Paragraph 23)
7. C (Paragraphs 9, 15, 17, 22, 26, 28)
8. D (Paragraphs 1, 6, 28)
Short-Answer Response
1. Looking at the world through his camera allows Rolf to distance himself from both the events going on around him and whatever emotions they might spark in him. Perhaps because a photograph necessarily depicts something that has already happened, the remove is not only spatial but temporal: “[I]t was as if [the lens] transported him to a different time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them.” (Paragraph 4)
2. Azucena says that the “bodies of her brothers and sisters [are] clinging to her legs.” This frames death as an active, self-replicating force, and it also implies that the rescue efforts are doomed; Azucena isn’t simply pinned by debris but trapped by death itself. (Paragraph 7)
3. Azucena shares memories of her life in the village before the eruption, and Rolf tells her stories about his work as a journalist. (Paragraph 15)
4. For the most part, the narrator can only be with Rolf and Azucena imaginatively; she goes to his workplace and watches news reports to feel closer to him. However, she does appear alongside them in one small way—through the stories that she told to Rolf, which he now tells Azucena: “I was present […] when he distracted her with the stories I had told him in a thousand and one nights beneath the white mosquito netting of our bed.” (Paragraph 22)
5. Rolf does not want to burden a dying girl with his memories of World War II and his father’s abuse. He also believes that she wouldn’t understand what he was talking about: “[S]he perhaps did not know there was a world beyond the sea or time previous to her own; she was not capable of imagining Europe in the years of the war.” (Paragraph 23)
6. Rolf comes to see the mud as a symbol of the traumas of his past and his inability to move beyond them: “He was Azucena; he was buried in the clayey mud; his terror was not the distant emotion of an almost forgotten childhood, it was a claw sunk in his throat.” (Paragraph 23)
7. The narrator depicts the President as ineffectual and primarily concerned with the optics of the disaster. He dresses for the occasion in a “tailored safari jacket” and makes a show of commiserating with Azucena and the other survivors; however, his response to the disaster—”vague promises” and threats of military crackdowns—shows he has no real emotional grasp of the situation or plan to deal with it. (Paragraph 26)
8. Azucena admits that no boy has ever loved her, and Rolf tells her that he does, kissing her on the forehead. According to the narrator, this moment of human connection helps him make peace with Azucena’s death: “I felt how in that instant both were saved from despair […] How, finally, they were able to accept death.” (Paragraph 27)
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By Isabel Allende
