Discussion

•••Your response should be at least 250-500 words long (approximately 1 fat paragraph), structured like a short essay. These questions ask you not only to demonstrate your comprehension of How the Dead Dream, but they ask you to apply the claims of the poems, stories, and articles you read. You can choose to answer ONE OR MORE of the questions; you do not have to answer them all. Be sure to offer textual evidence (examples) with page numbers in parenthetical, like so (25).

>>> Questions:

• Offspring: Why do the adults in How the Dead Dream react to the truths that T. tells them with anger and disgust? What does his mother’s resistance to pets on the basis of smell, hair, and defecation suggest? And how are his father’s attitudes similar or different? Why does his mom rant about Dresden, and how might his dad’s feeling like a ghost foreshadow what T. will become? How might his parents be read as exemplars of humanity?

• Capital: What do we learn about T. in the opening chapters of How the Dead Dream? For example, why is he fascinated by money and gaining wealth? Why might this characterization matter in a book that will be focused on the relationship between humans, animals, and the environment?

• Road Kill: Who is the “friend” the Coyote might welcome? Why is T. so affected by Coyote’s death? How do we know from the text that T. feels connected to this animal? Why might this moment represent a shift in T.’s characterization from the early chapter of the novel?