Charlotte's Web — Chapter 1

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter's argument or narrative arc, then identify the central tension E.B. White is developing — between the ethics of agricultural necessity and the ethics of individual recognition — and evaluate whether the author handles it honestly and effectively in these opening pages.

Discussion Questions

1. Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics that moral virtue is formed by habituation — a child becomes just by performing just acts. Fern's opening act in this book is the interruption of an ordinary farm routine in the name of a runt's life. Where does E.B. White agree with Aristotle, and where does E.B. White depart from him — that is, does the chapter suggest that justice is habituated, or that justice erupts from somewhere prior to habit?
2. This chapter was written in 1952 by a man who kept a pig on a Maine farm and who later wrote an essay, 'Death of a Pig,' about failing to save one. What does E.B. White understand about the moral geography of the American farm that most readers now — urban, insulated from slaughter — have lost access to? And what might an ethically serious modern reader understand about animal life that E.B. White, shaped by his era, did not quite see?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide