Bunnicula — Chapter 1

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 1's narrative arc, identify the central tension Howe has set up between the comic surface of the chapter and the more interesting psychological work happening underneath, and evaluate whether Howe handles the tension with sufficient honesty.

Discussion Questions

1. Harold's narrative voice belongs to the long tradition of comic unreliable narrators (Wooster, Shandy, Caulfield, Wodehouse's broader cast). Argue what is distinctive about Howe's choice to make the unreliable narrator a dog. Is the species-difference doing real literary work, or is it incidental to the technique? Connect to broader debates about animal narrators in literary fiction (Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain, Andrew O'Hagan's The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, the more philosophically ambitious experiments of contemporary animal fiction).
2. Howe's establishment of Harold's voice happens through rapid register-shifts in the first paragraph: Victorian melodrama, mock-heroic exaggeration, colloquial chatter, self-deprecating aside. Argue that this technique is not just craft but epistemology — that Howe is making a claim about how voices are actually constituted in literature (not by single-register consistency but by the rapid play of multiple registers held together by a single sensibility). Connect this to broader theories of literary voice in Bakhtin's account of dialogism, in Wayne Booth's account of the implied author, and in contemporary narratology.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide