The Oval Portrait

Question

by Edgar Allen Poe

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appenines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself.

"The Oval Portrait" by Edgar Allan Poe

Question
Use the passage from “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allen Poe to answer the question.

Which detail does the author leave uncertain in this excerpt? Select the two correct answers.

(1 point)
Responses

why the narrator stopped at the chateau
why the narrator stopped at the chateau

why the chateau was abandoned
why the chateau was abandoned

who the narrator traveled with
who the narrator traveled with

how the narrator was injured
how the narrator was injured

why the narrator slept with the bed curtains opened
why the narrator slept with the bed curtains opened
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Answer 1

The two details that the author leaves uncertain in the excerpt from "The Oval Portrait" are:

1. Why the chateau was abandoned - The text mentions that the chateau appeared to have been temporarily and very lately abandoned, but does not provide any details regarding the reason for its abandonment.

2. How the narrator was injured - The narrator refers to being in a "desperately wounded condition" but does not explain the cause or nature of the injury.

Therefore, the correct answers are:

• why the chateau was abandoned
• how the narrator was injured