Because of Winn-Dixie — Chapter 3

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter in no more than four sentences. Then identify the philosophical claim the chapter is making — about grief, about memory, about how a child holds a parent — and evaluate whether DiCamillo is arguing for that claim or simply observing it.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter is almost entirely composed of a conversation, bracketed by the physical act of bathing a dog. DiCamillo gives us very little stage business and almost no description of setting. What does this spareness accomplish? What would the chapter lose if it were more cinematically rendered? And is the spareness a matter of writing FOR children or a choice that would work equally well in adult fiction?
2. Opal requests '10 things' about her mother. The number is symbolic (one per year of her life) and functional (a contained, finite ask). This is also a specifically religious rhetorical form — preachers list. The whole chapter can be read as Opal learning her father's rhetorical mode from the inside and using it back on him. What is at stake when a child learns to speak to a parent in the parent's own rhetorical dialect? Is this the beginning of intimacy or the end of it?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide