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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is one of the quietest and most devastating in the whole book — E. B. White introduces Charlotte's mortality into a chapter ostensibly about a rival pig. Mountaineers should notice how the prose shrinks as Charlotte shrinks: her lines ('Perhaps,' 'But I feel like the end of a long day') grow shorter while Wilbur's remain hopeful and full, and the chapter's closing image — a spider hanging upside down on the ceiling, settling down for a nap — does all the grief-work the sentence declines to do explicitly.
Wilbur looked at his friend. She looked rather swollen and she seemed listless. "I'm awfully sorry to hear that you're feeling poorly, Charlotte," he said. "Perhaps if you spin a web and catch a coupl...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Narrate Chapter 17 in eight to ten sentences. Trace the chapter's three structural movements: the Fair's sensory arrival (music, Ferris wheel, Pontiac announcement, children released with their own money), the installation of Wilbur and Charlotte's dragline interview with Uncle, and the slow deceleration at midday — Charlotte's confession of fatigue, the oppressive heat, Lurvy's blanket stretched as a tent over the truck, and the entire family falling asleep.
Discussion Questions
- E. B. White opens Chapter 17 with a sensory overture — Ferris wheel, music, dust, hamburgers, balloons aloft, sheep blatting, and the loudspeaker hailing 'a Pontiac car, license number H-2439.' Examine this opening as a thesis about fictional place-construction. What does the author's refusal of summary ('the Fair was exciting') in favor of radically specific particulars reveal about his theory of the reader's role?
- The Arables' release of Fern and Avery — specific coins, specific warnings, Mrs. Arable's sigh and blown nose, Mr. Arable's 'they've got to grow up some time' — is given weight disproportionate to its plot function. Consider what the chapter is proposing about the moral architecture of letting go, and why White chooses to stage a small parental handoff with this much deliberation.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Lacking energy, enthusiasm, or interest; showing a weary inertia.
Item 2
In a manner showing extreme tiredness or fatigue.
Item 3
Enlarged beyond the normal size by fluid, air, or internal growth.
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Critical Thinking
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