easy · Enhanced ACT reading
A literary narrator reflects: "I had always thought my father's silences were a wall he built against us. It was not until I packed his study that I understood: a man who has spent thirty years deciding which truths would wound his children, and withholding them, does not build a wall but carries one. The silence I had resented as exclusion had been, all along, a kind of labor done on my behalf."
The shift in the narrator's understanding is best described as a movement from seeing the father's silence as:
- a barrier that shut the narrator out to seeing it as an effort the father sustained for the narrator's protection.
- a sign of the father's indifference to seeing it as evidence of his secret resentment of the family.
- a deliberate cruelty to seeing it as an unconscious habit the father had simply never learned to control.
- a temporary estrangement to seeing it as a permanent rupture that packing up his late father's study finally confirmed.
Sign up free to see the explanation and track your rank →
More Enhanced ACT reading practice
- What is the main idea of the paragraph?
- Which of the following is the central point of the paragraph?
- Which choice best summarizes the main idea of the passage?
- What date was written on the map?
- what time did Elias check his watch?
- The passage indicates that the economist responds to her critics primarily by:
- The passage most strongly suggests that the keeper's true motivation for his long service
- The author includes the examples of opening jars and carrying coconut shells primarily in