Challenge 182 A

What is the Über-Answer?

In Sam Kean’s “The Über-Unicorn,” the literature instructor tells the reader about the final exam he has inflicted upon his class:

We had read Tolstoy and Stendahl and Homer that semester and for the final I had asked an impossibly simple philosophical question: “What underlying characteristics unify every work we have examined?”

Doug Shaw answers the question, all right, but what does his answer say about the question itself?

Responses welcome!