Great Circle Quiz: 20 Questions on Plot, Characters, and Themes
How to Use This Quiz
This twenty-question quiz spans the full arc of Great Circle, testing your grasp of the plot, the motivations driving Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter, the novel's central symbols, and the ways the two timelines speak to each other. Questions 1–8 cover plot and sequence, 9–13 probe character motivation, 14–17 explore themes and symbols, and 18–20 ask you to synthesize the whole. A complete answer key with brief explanations follows the questions.
Part I: Plot and Sequence (Questions 1–8)
1. (Multiple choice) In the novel's epigraph, Rainer Maria Rilke's speaker describes living life in:
- A) A straight line toward a fixed destination
- B) Widening circles that reach out across the world
- C) A descending spiral into darkness
- D) A series of disconnected episodes
2. (Multiple choice) As defined in the novel's opening chapter, a great circle is:
- A) The largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere
- B) Any circle drawn on a globe
- C) The path of the sun across the sky
- D) A circle that passes through the equator only
3. (Multiple choice) Who raises Marian and Jamie Graves after their parents' deaths?
- A) Their grandmother Berit
- B) Their uncle Wallace
- C) Their father's friend Caleb
- D) A Missoula baker named Mr. Stanley
4. (Multiple choice) What happens to Marian at the end of her 1950 flight from Little America III?
- A) She crashes into the Southern Ocean and drowns
- B) She lands safely in New Zealand
- C) She parachutes from the plane and swims ashore on Campbell Island
- D) She turns back to Antarctica
5. (Multiple choice) What is the name of Marian's plane on her round-the-world flight?
- A) The Josephina Eterna
- B) The Peregrine
- C) The Bellanca
- D) The Spitfire
6. (Short answer) What happens to Jamie Graves during World War II?
7. (Multiple choice) How do Hadley Baxter's parents die?
- A) In a car accident
- B) In a plane crash when she is two years old
- C) In a house fire
- D) They disappear and are never found
8. (Short answer) What route does Marian plan for her around-the-world flight?
Part II: Character Motivation (Questions 9–13)
9. (Multiple choice) Why does Marian marry Barclay Macqueen?
- A) She is deeply in love with him
- B) To save Wallace and Jamie from financial ruin
- C) To gain access to his planes
- D) Because she is pregnant
10. (Multiple choice) Why does Hadley initially agree to play Marian Graves?
- A) She admires Marian's courage
- B) She needs the money
- C) Because saying yes is easier than saying no
- D) To spite the Archangel franchise
11. (Short answer) Why does Marian leave her logbook behind at Little America III?
12. (Multiple choice) Why does Marian jump from the Peregrine rather than crash with it?
- A) She wants to die in the ocean
- B) She decides she wants to live and make a new life
- C) Eddie told her to jump
- D) The plane was on fire
13. (Short answer) What does Hadley do at the end of the novel to confront her fear of flying?
Part III: Theme and Symbol (Questions 14–17)
14. (Multiple choice) What does the great circle most directly symbolize in the novel?
- A) The perfection of God's creation
- B) The unfinished, endless nature of a life's journey
- C) The circular orbit of the planets
- D) The cycle of the seasons
15. (Multiple choice) What does the narwhal tusk that Marian unpacks from Addison's crates represent?
- A) The wealth of the Graves family
- B) The beast within and the pull of adventure
- C) A religious relic
- D) A weapon for hunting
16. (Short answer) What does the albatross represent in the scene where Marian flies toward Campbell Island?
17. (Multiple choice) What does the Peregrine plane come to represent over the course of the novel?
- A) Marian's independence and the sacrifice of her old self
- B) The military power of the war
- C) Barclay's control over Marian
- D) The American dream
Part IV: Synthesis (Questions 18–20)
18. (Short answer) How do the two timelines—Marian's and Hadley's—connect structurally?
19. (Short answer) What does Hadley mean when she says no story can ever be whole?
20. (Multiple choice) Which theme appears in both Marian's and Hadley's stories?
- A) The importance of family dynasties
- B) Reinvention as a response to loss and constraint
- C) The superiority of rural life over city life
- D) The dangers of ambition
Answer Key
1. B. The epigraph, from Rilke's The Book of Hours, describes a speaker living in widening circles that reach across the world, acknowledging the final circle may go unfinished.
2. A. The novel defines a great circle as the circumference created when a sphere is cut into two perfect halves—the largest circle possible on a sphere. The equator and all lines of longitude are examples.
3. B. After their parents' deaths, the twins are raised by their uncle Wallace and his wife Berit in Missoula, Montana.
4. C. When fuel begins leaking from the left wing, Marian decides to sacrifice the plane, dons a parachute, and jumps. She lands in the water, is battered against rocks, and drags herself ashore on Campbell Island, where she knocks on the door of a hut with a radio mast.
5. B. Marian's surplus Dakota aircraft is named the Peregrine. The plane flies on without her after she jumps and crashes into the ocean.
6. Jamie serves as a combat artist in Alaska during the war, witnesses the invasion of Attu, and is killed. In December 1943, Marian learns of his death when Caleb understands immediately what has happened.
7. B. Hadley's parents died in a plane crash when she was two, and she was raised by her uncle Mitch, who got her into acting.
8. Marian plans to fly around the world north-south, over both poles. She proposes this route to Matilda Feiffer, who agrees to help finance the flight.
9. B. Barclay confesses to buying up Wallace's debts and sending men to collect, driving Wallace to contemplate suicide. Marian marries Barclay to save Wallace and Jamie from ruin, not out of love.
10. C. Hadley reasons that yes is easier than no when she agrees to play Marian, after reading Marian's book, Carol Feiffer's book, and the Day brothers' screenplay over three days.
11. Marian leaves the logbook behind to abandon the truth along with Eddie, erasing her old identity so she can make a new life. The logbook is later published in 1959 as The Sea, the Sky, the Birds Between.
12. B. Marian initially considers diving into the sea but pulls up and decides to continue. She concludes that the only way she can contend with continued life is to make a new one, so she sacrifices the plane and jumps.
13. Hadley takes another flying lesson with a female instructor, admits she previously froze and let go of the controls, and then takes the yoke. With the instructor's guidance, she pulls back, and the windshield fills with sky.
14. B. Marian reflects that circles are wondrous because they are endless, but that endlessness is also torture. She doubts anything can be completed, and the great circle becomes the novel's emblem of the unfinished journey.
15. B. The narwhal tusk, unpacked from Addison's crates, is associated in the outline with "the beast within" and the pull of adventure and exploration that shapes Marian's life.
16. The albatrosses carve the air as Marian flies toward Campbell Island, and she reflects that she doesn't belong among them. They represent the natural, effortless freedom she is leaving behind as she chooses a hidden life.
17. A. The Peregrine represents Marian's independence—her defiance of the sun and her commitment to the circle—and its sacrifice marks the end of her old identity. The plane's independence is emphasized when it flies on without her, oblivious to its watery end.
18. Hadley is an actress cast to play Marian in a biopic directed by Bart Olofsson. Her research, the letters Adelaide Scott shares with her, and her visit to Joey Kamaka in Hawaii gradually reveal Marian's true story, while both women grapple with identity, loss, and reinvention. The film's nonlinear structure—starting at the end, flashing back to the shipwreck, then moving forward—mirrors the novel's own intercutting of timelines.
19. Hadley means that any account of a life is necessarily incomplete: memory is unreliable, people keep secrets, and evidence is fragmentary. The novel dramatizes this through the conflicting versions of Marian—her own logbook, Carol Feiffer's distorted adaptation, the Day brothers' screenplay, and the letters that surface decades later—none of which captures the whole truth.
20. B. Both Marian and Hadley reinvent themselves in response to loss and constraint. Marian becomes Martin Wallace, then Alice Root, building a new life in New Zealand; Hadley works to shed her Archangel persona and confront her fear of flying. The novel's epigraph—about living in widening circles and giving oneself to an unfinished journey—frames both women's arcs.
Further Study
- Great Circle: Overview and Analysis
- Great Circle: Questions and Answers
- Great Circle: Ending Explained