Bunnicula — Chapter 1

About This Passage

These six sentences perform a complete establishment of Harold's narrative voice and do at least four distinct things in rapid succession. First, they invoke Victorian melodramatic register ('I shall never forget'). Second, they introduce the comic gap between word and referent (the heavy 'abomination' applied to the vacuum cleaner). Third, they shift to colloquial reported speech ('That's something they always say'). Fourth, they reveal Harold's interior commentary on his family's behavior ('I think it's their way of making up for not taking me with them'). The fifth sentence ('As if I wanted to go anyway') is the small jewel of the paragraph: it shows Harold simultaneously acknowledging his family's attempt at consolation and refusing to need the consolation, claiming a dignity he both does and does not possess. The voice that emerges is recognizable as a comic unreliable narrator in the tradition of Bertie Wooster (Wodehouse), Tristram Shandy (Sterne), Holden Caulfield (Salinger), and the dog narrators of more recent literary fiction (Garth Stein, Jon Katz). What distinguishes Harold from these predecessors is his species — he is, technically, a dog — but the literary technique is identical to its human-narrator antecedents. Copying this passage trains a writer to notice how voice can be built from rapid register-shifts and how a single self-deprecating aside can establish the narrator's complete relationship to himself, his family, and his own dignity.

Narration Prompt

Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.

Discussion Questions

1. Harold's narrative voice belongs to the tradition of comic unreliable narrators (Bertie Wooster, Tristram Shandy, Holden Caulfield) — narrators whose self-presentation is part of the comedy and whose unreliability is the point. Argue what is distinctive about Harold's version of this tradition. Is the difference primarily that Harold is a dog, or is there something more interesting going on? What does an animal narrator allow that a human unreliable narrator cannot?
2. The chapter establishes the conditions of possibility for the entire book through Harold's claim that the Monroes 'treat everyone with great respect for his or her intelligence. That goes for the animals as well as the people.' Without this enabling claim, the premise of the book — animals with developed inner lives observing a family — would not work. Argue what is at stake in choosing this specific kind of family rather than a more ordinary one, and consider whether the choice is mostly practical (it makes the book possible) or also thematic (it carries meaning of its own).

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide