The Blind Man quiz
By Guy de Maupassant
A blind peasant becomes the butt of his family's cruelty in a Norman farmhouse, until one freezing winter day their hatred goes as far as it can
24 questions · about 25 minutes
Questions and answers
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Question 1. Which literary categories best describe "The Blind Man"?
- Correct answer: Realism, Naturalism & Social Tragedy
- Gothic Horror, Ghost Story & Dark Romance
- Romantic Adventure, Hero Quest & Wild Nature
- Folktale, Fable & Parable
- Satire, Comedy of Manners & Farce
Realism, Naturalism & Social Tragedy is the best fit. Maupassant shows peasant life without softening it, down to the soup, the corks and the crows. Like other Naturalist writers, he shows people driven by poverty and instinct, the "inborn ferocity" of the brutes around the blind man. And it is a tragedy made by society: the blind man dies because no one around him cares whether he lives.
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Question 2. How does the story open?
- With the narrator describing the blind man's lonely funeral mass
- Correct answer: With the narrator wondering why sunlight fills us with joy
- With the blind man begging for charity on the high-road
- With farmers spotting crows above a snowy open field
The story begins, "How is it that the sunlight gives us such joy?" The narrator describes the blue sky, green fields and white houses that delight "our enchanted eyes". Only then does he turn to the blind, who cannot share in any of it.
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Question 3. According to the narrator, how do the blind behave on a bright, happy day?
- They grow restless and beg someone to lead them out into the sunny fields
- They join the children who dance and sing in the village doorways
- Correct answer: They stay calm and keep checking their dogs when the dogs try to play
- They grow angry and complain that the bright light hurts their eyes
The blind sit "impassive in their eternal darkness" and "continually check their dogs as they attempt to play." When a child says it was a fine day, the blind person answers, "I could notice that it was fine. Loulou wouldn't keep quiet." They know about the sunshine only from a restless dog.
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Question 4. In the narrator's example, what is the name of the blind person's dog?
- Correct answer: Loulou
- Médor
- Bijou
- Fifi
The blind person says, "I could notice that it was fine. Loulou wouldn't keep quiet." The dog's playfulness is the only way the blind person knows the day was sunny.
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Question 5. When does the blind man's life become a misery?
- When he loses his sight in an accident on the farm as a young man
- When his sister marries and moves away to another village
- When he is put out of the farmhouse to sleep in the barn
- Correct answer: When his parents die and he must live on his sister's charity
"As long as his father and mother lived, he was more or less taken care of," but "as soon as the old people were gone, an atrocious life of misery commenced for him." Dependent on his sister, he is treated "as a beggar who is eating the bread of strangers."
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Question 6. What does "Impassive" mean in this story?
- Correct answer: Showing no feeling or reaction
- Quick to anger at small insults
- Openly eager and full of feeling
- Kind and gentle toward others
Impassive means showing no emotion. The blind sit "impassive in their eternal darkness." The blind man's "impassiveness", along with his inability to work, "eventually exasperated his relatives." His blank calm becomes one more reason for them to torment him.
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Question 7. How does the blind man respond to the insults hurled at him?
- He shouts curses at the crowd and threatens to leave the farm for good
- Correct answer: He stays silent and unmoved, so no one can tell if he feels them
- He weeps openly and begs his sister to make the others stop
- He laughs along with the crowd, pretending to enjoy the joke
"He remained unmoved at all the insults hurled at him, so reserved that one could not tell whether he felt them." No one asks: "Had he any intellect, any thinking faculty, any consciousness of his own existence? Nobody cared to inquire." No one around him bothers to find out whether he can suffer.
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Question 8. What cruel joke do the neighbors gather in the kitchen to watch?
- He is led around the yard and left to find his way back inside
- He is made to guess which of the neighbors is speaking to him each time
- Correct answer: A cat or dog is set to eat from his plate while he eats his soup
- His spoon is hidden, and he must search the table to find it
"Sometimes they placed before his plate, when he was beginning to eat his soup, some cat or dog." The animal laps up his food, then scampers away from his spoon, and the spectators "burst out laughing". He keeps eating "with his right hand, while stretching out his left to protect his plate."
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Question 9. What do the people at the farmhouse call the blind man at meals?
- A thief and a liar
- A saint and a martyr
- A fool and a coward
- Correct answer: A drone and a clown
At every meal "he was called a drone, a clown." A drone is a lazy creature that lives off the work of others. The insult is unfair, since his brother-in-law has taken his inheritance.
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Question 10. What does "Infirmity" mean in this story?
- A feeling of deep shame or guilt
- A place where the sick are cared for
- Great strength of body and health
- Correct answer: A physical weakness or disability
An infirmity is a physical weakness or disability; here it is his blindness. "He suffered little save from his horrible infirmity" while his parents lived. Later the narrator says the peasants "would be glad to kill the infirm of their species, as poultry do."
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Question 11. The narrator says peasants would kill the infirm of their species, as poultry do. What does this comparison suggest?
- Correct answer: The peasants act on brute instinct, like animals, not on human pity
- The peasants care far more for their chickens than for any person
- The blind man is as gentle and harmless as a hen in the farmyard
- The farm animals treat the blind man more kindly than people do
The narrator explains that "in country places useless persons are considered a nuisance, and the peasants would be glad to kill the infirm of their species, as poultry do." The comparison puts the peasants on the level of animals. The story keeps returning to this idea, calling the people around him "the brutes who surrounded him."
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Question 12. Why is the blind man finally sent out to beg?
- He asks to go, hoping to earn enough money to leave the farm for good
- Correct answer: His relatives resent feeding him and want him to bring in money
- The village priest arranges it as a kindness to the poor man
- His sister hopes the fresh air of the road will cure his eyes
The brother-in-law is "angry at having to support him always," and then "At last he was forced to beg." On market-days he holds out his hat, stammering, "Charity, if you please!" But "for whole weeks he did not bring back a sou," and their resentment turns into "furious, pitiless hatred."
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Question 13. What does the blind man stammer as he holds out his hat?
- Bread for a blind man!
- Alms for the love of God!
- Correct answer: Charity, if you please!
- Help a poor sinner, sir!
He reaches out his hat when he hears footsteps or a vehicle, stammering, "Charity, if you please!" The peasants give little: "for whole weeks he did not bring back a sou."
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Question 14. On the night he abandons the blind man, what does the brother-in-law tell his household?
- The blind man ran off to live with a farmer in the next village
- He left the blind man at the church, where the priest gave him a bed
- The blind man has died in the snow and has already been buried
- Correct answer: He found no trace of him, and he will turn up for his soup tomorrow
He tells them "he could find no trace of the mendicant" and adds, "He'll turn up soon enough tomorrow to eat the soup." The story introduces this episode with the line "Then he became the victim of furious, pitiless hatred. And this is how he died." Readers are left to see that leaving him there was deliberate.
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Question 15. How does the blind man die?
- Correct answer: He sits down in an open field, and the falling snow buries him
- He falls through the ice of a frozen river while crossing it
- He is struck by a carriage on the dark, icy high road at night
- He is beaten to death by a passing vagabond on the high road
Feeling that he is dying of cold, he walks blindly, "falling into ditches, getting up again," looking for shelter. Numb, "he sat down in the middle of an open field. He did not get up again." The snow covers him until "nothing was left to indicate the place where he lay."
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Question 16. What does "Affection" mean in this story?
- A feeling of fondness or warm liking
- Correct answer: A disease or disorder of the body
- A false show of grief or pity
- A habit of shyness among strangers
Here affection does not mean fondness. In older English it can mean a disease or disorder, so "only his eyelids, quivering from some nervous affection" means a nervous condition makes his eyelids twitch. The story makes clear he "had never known any tenderness," so the fondness meaning would not fit.
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Question 17. How do his relatives behave after the blind man disappears?
- They search day and night for weeks and offer a reward for any news
- They refuse to search at all and openly celebrate his absence
- Correct answer: They pretend to search for a week and even make a show of weeping
- They report him missing to the police and the village priest
"His relatives made a pretence of inquiring about him and searching for him for about a week. They even made a show of weeping." The words pretence and show mark this as a false display: they act out grief for a man they wanted rid of.
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Question 18. How is the blind man's body found?
- The thaw melts the snow, and his sister finds him on a walk
- A dog from the farmhouse leads the brother-in-law to the spot
- Farmers plowing in spring turn up his body with their plows
- Correct answer: Crows gather over the field, and a young fellow goes to see why
Farmers going to mass see "a great flight of crows" whirling over the open field and diving "like a shower of black rain". A week later the birds are still there, and "A young fellow went to see what they were doing and discovered the body of the blind man, already half devoured".
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Question 19. What is the cruelest irony in the discovery of the body?
- Correct answer: The crows peck out the very eyes that never let him see
- His sister is the first to find him after refusing to look
- He dies only a few steps from the door of a warm house
- The coins he begged for are found frozen inside his hat
The last detail of the discovery is "His wan eyes had disappeared, pecked out by the long, voracious beaks." His blind eyes, the cause of all his suffering, are destroyed even in death. Nothing in the story suggests he died near shelter or carried money; he never found a house, and he rarely brought back even a sou.
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Question 20. Why does the narrator begin and end the story with sunlight?
- To show that the blind man secretly loved the warmth of summer days
- Correct answer: To contrast the joy of seeing with the dark, cruel life of the blind man
- To suggest that the blind man died on a bright and sunny summer day
- To reveal that the narrator himself is going blind and fears the dark
The story opens with the joy that sunlight brings to people who can see, and ends: "And I can never feel the glad radiance of sunlit days without sadly remembering and pondering over the fate of the beggar." This contrast frames the blind man's life of darkness. He died in winter, not summer, and nothing suggests the narrator is losing his sight.
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Question 21. Which of these events actually happened in the story?
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The blind man's brother-in-law took possession of his share of the inheritance.
Happened
The story says "his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance," yet the blind man is grudged even his soup.
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The blind man's mother always treated him with tenderness and care.
Didn't happen
He "had never known any tenderness, his mother having always treated him unkindly and caring very little for him."
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Neighbors came to the farmhouse kitchen to watch the jokes played on him at meals.
Happened
The cruel jokes became an entertainment: "it was talked about from door to door, and every day the kitchen of the farmhouse was full of people."
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On market-days the blind man begged enough money to pay for his keep.
Didn't happen
"But the peasant is not lavish, and for whole weeks he did not bring back a sou." His failure to bring in money turns his relatives' dislike into hatred.
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He was made to chew corks and bits of wood that he could not tell from food.
Happened
"Another time they made him chew corks, bits of wood, leaves or even filth, which he was unable to distinguish."
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The brother-in-law searched all night for the blind man after leaving him on the road.
Didn't happen
He told his household he could find no trace of him and said, "Pooh! best not bother about him!" He expects the blind man back for his soup the next day.
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The falling snow buried the blind man's body so that nothing showed where he lay.
Happened
The flakes "buried him," and "nothing was left to indicate the place where he lay."
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His sister found his body the day after he disappeared.
Didn't happen
The body stays hidden under the snow because the winter is severe and the thaw is slow. Only later do crows draw a young fellow to the field, and he is the one who finds it.
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Farmers on their way to mass noticed crows circling over the open field.
Happened
"Now, one Sunday, on their way to mass, the farmers noticed a great flight of crows, who were whirling incessantly above the open field."
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The whole village mourned at his funeral and regretted its cruelty.
Didn't happen
The story mentions no funeral and no regret. The narrator ends by saying the beggar was such an outcast that "his horrible death was a relief to all who had known him."
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Question 22. What is the central theme of "The Blind Man"?
- Hard work and patience are rewarded in time by family and friends
- Nature always punishes those who are cruel to the poor and helpless
- Correct answer: People can be cruel to the weak who cannot work or defend themselves
- Blindness gives a person a wisdom that the sighted can never share
The blind man is hated because he is "useless" to people who value only work: "in country places useless persons are considered a nuisance." His family, neighbors and even passing vagabonds join in tormenting him, and no one is punished. The story shows how ordinary people turn cruel toward someone who cannot work or fight back.
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Question 23. What does it suggest that the narrator never gives the blind man a name?
- That the narrator has forgotten it after so many years have passed
- That the blind man refuses to tell anyone at the farm his name
- That his family name would shame his sister in the village
- Correct answer: That others treat him not as a person but as a burden or a joke
He is only "the blind man", "the mendicant", "the beggar" and "the helpless creature". No one cared about his "consciousness of his own existence." Leaving him nameless mirrors how the people around him see him: as a burden or a source of fun, not as a person. The story never gives any other reason.
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Question 24. In the final sentence, what does the narrator say about the blind man's death?
- Correct answer: That his horrible death was a relief to all who had known him
- That the whole village mourned him and regretted its cruelty
- That his relatives were punished by the law for leaving him
- That the narrator himself tried to help him but came too late
The narrator remembers "the fate of the beggar" whenever he feels the joy of sunlit days, and says the beggar was such an outcast in life that "his horrible death was a relief to all who had known him." No one is punished, and no one is sorry. That bitter ending is the narrator's final judgment on the people around the blind man.
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