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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage contains one of the book's most quietly devastating moments — the parallel sigh between an old woman and a ten-year-old girl, two beings whose loneliness is otherwise as different as they could be. Notice the structure DiCamillo uses to bring them together: she gives Miss Franny a long, lonely thought ('I imagine I'm the only one left'), then she has Opal recognize the feeling ('it was the same way I felt sometimes'), and then she gives Opal the same physical action — the sigh. The two sighs are the chapter's emotional climax, and DiCamillo earns them by refusing to make a speech about cross-generational understanding. She just gives us two people sighing in the same room, and trusts the reader to feel the recognition. Notice also the use of anaphora ('I imagine... I imagine...') and the small word 'all' that carries the weight of the loss ('they're ALL dead and gone'). The passage is a textbook example of how a careful writer can make a child reader feel the texture of an elderly person's grief without ever explaining it.
I imagine I'm the only one left from those days. I imagine I'm the only one that even recalls that bear. All my friends, everyone I knew when I was young, they're all dead and gone. She sighed again. ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Miss Franny's bear story. Then identify the moment in the chapter when Opal stops being just a curious listener and becomes a friend. What signal does DiCamillo give us that this transition has happened?
Discussion Questions
- Miss Franny describes her younger self with affectionate self-mockery: 'I was a Miss smarty pants with my library full of books. Oh yes ma'am. I thought I knew the answers to everything.' Analyze the tone of this self-description. What does it tell us about how Miss Franny has aged — what she has come to understand about herself that she did not understand at fourteen?
- When the bear walks in, Miss Franny thinks 'if this bear intends to eat me, I am not going to let it happen without a fight.' She throws a book at the bear and screams 'Be gone!' This is courage, but it is also slightly absurd. Is DiCamillo asking us to admire the young Miss Franny, laugh at her, or both? And how does she manage to make us do both at once?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
the rhetorical figure of beginning two or more clauses or sentences with the same word or phrase, used to intensify emotional weight
Item 2
the moment when one person sees a feeling in another person and realizes they have felt it themselves — the basis of cross-generational empathy
Item 3
having too much pride — the kind of confidence that has not yet been tempered by experience
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Critical Thinking
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