Discussion Questions
1. Is there any acknowledgment that Willis's
wife Estelle might be undergoing the same grief that Willis feels, or is
she presented merely as part of the problem?
2. Does the catalogue of Willis's problems
go from least to greatest or from greatest to least, tragedy to anticlimax?
Is this arrangement necessary to the story's effect?
3. The narrator keeps being drawn away from
Willis Kaw's point of view to that of others, like the psychiatrist's or
the gravedigger's. Are these distractions or integral to the point of the
story.
4. Is the final turn set up earlier in the
story or is it a complete surprise?
5. How does this story fit Samuel Delany's
idea of a reading protocol for SF? Are the interpretive shifts it requires
more characteristic of SF than of other kinds of narrative? |
