Henry and Mudge and the Happy Cat — Chapter 1

About This Passage

Three sentences in plain English do what novelists labor over: establish setting, introduce subject, render appearance, and stage the watchers. The third sentence's careful repetition — 'Henry and Henry's father and Henry's big dog' — is a small liturgy that names every witness. This is the prose of someone who has decided to waste no word.

Narration Prompt

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

Discussion Questions

1. Cynthia Rylant builds the entire chapter on a gap between speech and action: the father uses the language of contempt for the cat ('shabbiest,' 'disaster') while performing every gesture of welcome (opens the door, carries it in, watches it drink three bowls of milk). What is the moral structure of a man like this? Is his disguised love a virtue, a defect, or merely a style? What in the text — beyond charm — invites you to take a position?
2. When Henry insists, 'It has to be a stray. It has to be,' the repetition is doing work. He is telling himself something. Augustine writes in the Confessions of how desire precedes belief — we want a thing to be true, and then we make it true. Is Henry an Augustinian creature here? What does the chapter suggest about how children, and adults, decide what to believe?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide