This question is based on General Literature Principles and Literary Appreciation
‘America! there it lay, handy and tantalizing, allheat and scurry. All morning they had kept catching glimpses of it beyond the potholes as they stood in long lines, waiting to reach the tables where the immigration men in dacrion shirts checked their visas, inspected the X-ray pictures of their lungs that they held in their hands, decided whether to admit them or not. Getting into America was, it seemed, quite as hard as getting into heaven; and the trouble was… that as with heaven one couldn’t know whether one would like it when one got there’.
The picture of America presented in this passage is that of a place
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of unknown and uncertain qualities
- choked with red tape
- as inviting as heaven itself
- off-putting on account of the heat