The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse — Class 11 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse (Class 11 English)

William Saroyan's story of two poor Armenian boys and a stolen horse. Its subject is not the theft but the tribe's eleven-century reputation for honesty, which proves strong enough to override the evidence of a farmer's own eyes.

Aram and Mourad

Aram, the nine-year-old narrator, is woken at four in the morning by his cousin Mourad, 'who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me', sitting on a beautiful white horse.

The Garoghlanian family

An Armenian tribe living 'in the most amazing and comical poverty in the world', yet famous for honesty for something like eleven centuries, even when they were the wealthiest family in the world.

Proud first, honest next

Aram's statement of the family code: 'We were proud first, honest next, and after that we believed in right and wrong. None of us would take advantage of anybody in the world, let alone steal.'

The boy's reasoning

Aram decides that stealing a horse for a ride is not stealing at all — 'It wouldn't become stealing until we offered to sell the horse, which of course, I knew we would never do.'

The crazy streak

Every family has one, and Mourad is its natural descendant. Before him came uncle Khosrove, an enormous man with the largest moustache in the San Joaquin Valley.

Pay no attention to it

Khosrove's answer to every complaint — the lost horse, the ten-mile walk, the painful leg, the sixty dollars. Aram's mother explains that he has a gentle heart but is homesick and a large man.

Mourad's understanding with animals

'I have an understanding with a horse… A simple and honest one.' He also mends the wing of a young robin, and later the farmer's dogs do not bark at him.

John Byro

An Assyrian farmer who had learned Armenian out of loneliness. His white horse had been stolen a month earlier; it cost sixty dollars, and without it his surrey is useless.

Hiding the horse

Mourad keeps the horse in the barn of a deserted vineyard once owned by a farmer named Fetvajian, and the boys ride it early every morning for two weeks.

My Heart

The name Mourad gives the horse when John Byro asks. 'A lovely name,' the farmer says, 'for a lovely horse.'

Tooth for tooth

Byro examines the horse's mouth and says he would swear it was his own 'if I didn't know your parents. The fame of your family for honesty is well known to me.'

Believing his heart

'A suspicious man would believe his eyes instead of his heart.' The farmer chooses the family's reputation over the evidence and says nothing more.