The Living, by Annie Dillard

NOTE: There is a character list at the beginning of the novel.   These are the same characters rearranged in a different format.  There is also a short vocabulary quiz with words from the novel  at the end.

Characters

Clare Fishburn Rooney - father Ada – mother, second husband Norval Tawes June Randall – wife, Minta Homer’s sister Mabel – daughter Glee Fishburn – Clare’s brother Grace – wife Vinnie and Nesta - daughters Minta Randalal Honer Eustace – husband, drowned clearing log jam Bert, Lulu and Hugh – children Bert and Lulu died in fire Hugh built in fireplace Howard, Green and Ardeth – Queen of May’s children raised by Minta Hugh Honer – attending medical school Vinnie Fishburn – future wife

John Ireland Sharp Family all drowned except John Pearl – wife Children – Cyrus, Vincent, Rush and Horace Johnny Lee – railroad worker, then employed by Sharps Lee Chin – brother, killed by Beal Beal Obenchain Axel and Martha – parents, took in John Sharp when family drowned Nan – sister, married Will Ruffin Senator Green Randall and Louisa – Minta and June’s parents in Baltimore

For Discussion:

NOTE: Page numbers are from 2013 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

1. Discuss the character of Beal Obenchain.  His father “distrusted his son Beal, and thought him a shirker” (page 63).   Consider the incident when Beal was small and he ran off with the deer’s intestine while father tried to kill the deer (page 63).  When he quit going to school his teacher reflected that “he was a coward who studied bullying” (page 64).  John Ireland Sharp later thought that when they were boys, “Beal had possibly often been afraid of him” (page 64).  How did he develop into the man he became?  Was there anything that could have been done to stop him before he murdered Lee Chin and threatened Clare Fishburn?
2. When Minta’s family was coming to visit, she “saw the scene with fresh eyes, and wondered if her mother, father and June could find aught to admire in her Indian friends – or in any of her friends” (page 119).  How do you think the Randall’s thought about Minta’s life?  What would they admire or appreciate?
3. Discuss how the Nooksack Indians and the Bostonians viewed their wives.  The Bostonians thought the Nooksack “use their women like mules” (page 121) while the Nooksack “pitied the Boston women” (page 122) because their husbands hit them.  
4. Throughout the novel were references about how men evaluate each other.  Discuss how people from the different backgrounds in the novel evaluated each other.  What criteria do we use today to evaluate someone’s worth?  
1. Towards the end of chapter 23 Clare Fishburn recognized that Senator Randall was “his own man – given here where his sort of man was less than nothing” (page 137).  Clare thought “that a man could be any sort at all, if he could carry it off” (page 137). 
2. Senator Randall in the end judged Clare a “a nobody” but Claire mistook his courteousness as respect.
3. On page 432, after the law was passed mandating education, Clare did not challenge Will Ruffin when he vowed to not send his children to school.  Will Ruffin felt that because Clare did not take the challenge, that “he was an inferior man, after all.” 
5. Discuss being ordinary.  When Ada thought about her sons, Clare and Glee, she thought “the times had gotten inside them in some ways as they aged, and made them both ordinary.  Which they were not meant to be: no one is” (page 202).  What did she mean by “ordinary?”   Is it a negative characteristic to be ordinary?
6. Discuss Clare and June’s reactions to Beal’s threat to kill Clare.  Clare almost seemed to accept the inevitable and thought “He needed to learn how to die” (page 231).  June on the other hand wanted to kill Beal first.
7. What was Beal’s motivation to threaten to kill a person who he selected randomly?
8. To what did you attribute Beal’s change in attitude about his life?  In chapter 70 he considered his life “vile” and thought “If he was not, as he did not now feel himself to be, the exceptional and superior man, then he was no man” (page 410).
9. Discuss Pearl Sharp.  She excelled “inside her house’s walls” and was not interested in discussing “things for men and boys,” and so “settled into the complacent ignorance of some women of her station, such as it was, who wondered why men disrespected them” (page 248).  On the other hand, she often stole and “picked up a few mote things for the harmless refreshment of it” (page 248).    At the end of the novel she got the big house she wanted, started an orphanage, seemed to accept John moving alone to an island, and still stole from the town’s store.   How would you explain her character?
10. In chapter 69, John Ireland Sharp moved to the isolated island.  He felt he could “at last permit himself to give up on himself entirely” (page 402).  How did you view his move? 
11. Two children I found particularly interesting were Cyrus and Mabel. 
1. Cyrus – he went to life by himself in the woods at a young age and always held his yo-yo.  He returned to a normal life style when he was in high school and was on the school basketball team.
2. Mabel was always described as “limp” although she did not seem to be described as having a disability.
12. Discuss your reading experience.   Did you enjoy the novel?  What did you like or not like about it?

Vocabulary Quiz (Match the bolded word with a definition below.  Note that two words were not found in a modern dictionary.):

Page 177 – “One of these roisterers apparently got ‘bedoozled,’ …”

Page 201 – “The Pioneers let Rooney join because…there were not enough old-timers left by the late seventies to make a good club – not that they had all died, but they had quit the settlement, absquatulated…”

Page 243 – “In fact, she (Vinnie) brought to the least occasions a fervidity and an ardor that stimulated people…”

Page 273 – On the journey east, Minta had told the children that by custom, children were mute and sessile on trains…”

Page 284 – “June had been unnerved and vexed all week, all month.  She had left home for Baltimore in a swivet.”

Page 352 – “Rush’s interesting brother Cyrus had caught a striped snake hours ago, and the children had passes it from arm to arm and stuck their fingertips in its mouth, seeking to give their mothers the pleefer, to astounding success.”

Definitions:

1. Permanently attached to a base
2. State of nervous excitement
3. Enthusiasm
4. Fled or absconded
5. Not in dictionary
6. Not in dictionary

*****

First Semester Success: 2nd Edition, by Dr. Arden B. Hamer, is now available as an  eBook.   The paper edition will be available soon.  Click on the upper right link.