For Thursday's class, read the rest of Part One and all of Part Two (it seems like a lot, but this books reads very quickly--too quickly, unless you force yourself to slow down and smell the metaphors).
Answer two of the following:
Q1: Since LaVaughn doesn't have the vocabulary or the experience to see things that the author (and some of the audience) can see, Wolff uses metaphors to bridge the gap between her perspective and the world outside. One example of this is when she notices Jody's green swimming trunks, which "are bigger than Adam's fig leaf/but my insides feel like a window opening" (76). How is the author speaking through LaVaughn here, telling us more than LaVaughn herself is aware of? Is there another passage like this you noticed?
Q2: Why are some chapters, such as Chapter 25 and 31, extremely short, just two stanzas or so of poetry? Why not make every chapter roughly the same size? Also, who do you think is organizing these chapters? The author? Or LaVaughn?
Q3: Writing of Patrick in Chapter 61 (skipping ahead a little--sorry), LaVaughn remarks that “Patrick and I were like two pencils in a box,/parallel but not alive to each other” (190). What makes it so hard for her to connect with Patrick, despite all their common interests, rather than Jody, with whom she has much less in common?
Q4: Though like many teenagers, LaVaughn is a little annoyed by her mother and her over-watchfulness, how does she come to see her mother as a person, and not just a mother in these chapters? Why might this be an important part of any bildungsroman (German for the novel of growth/education)?
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