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Copywork
About This Passage
Having clawed water from the mud, Stanley uncovers an onion and eats it raw. Sachar traces the single bite through Stanley’s whole body, from the bitter burst that reaches his eyes to the warmth that finally sinks into his stomach. Watch how the path of the onion through him mirrors the chapter’s larger movement from sharp pain to comfort.
He bit into it without peeling it. The hot bitter juice burst into his mouth. He could feel it all the way up to his eyes. And when he swallowed, he felt its warmth move down his throat and into his s...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell the chapter in sequence: Stanley lifts the fallen Zero onto his shoulder and carries him up the mountain, climbing by thinking only of one step at a time; despair overtakes him as Big Thumb turns into an unclimbable precipice with no water; he slips and falls into a muddy gully and realizes that mud means water; he digs until he finds water and then an onion, sharing both with Zero. Then identify the moment you take to be the chapter's hinge, and defend your choice.
Discussion Questions
- Stanley leaves behind his shovel and his sack of jars and lifts the helpless Zero onto his shoulder instead, carrying a friend who can do nothing for him up the mountain. What does Stanley's choice to abandon his own belongings for Zero reveal about the person he has become? Use details from the chapter to explain why you read it that way.
- At his lowest point, face down in the mud and ready to give up, Stanley is interrupted by his own thought: 'You need water to make mud!' Why might Sachar place this realization exactly at the moment Stanley has surrendered, and what does that placement do to the way the rescue feels? Use details from the chapter to explain why you read it that way.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
A sheer, near-vertical rock face that falls away abruptly; once the ground levels, Big Thumb reveals itself as one of these, so steep and forbidding that Stanley grasps at once the climb is beyond him.
Item 2
Drew in and took up completely, as a sponge does with liquid; Stanley imagines the rock has done this with his energy during his long fixation on it, so that it now exerts a magnetic pull on him.
Item 3
Bore a likeness to; from a distance the rock looked like a thumb, but at close range it no longer does this, its familiar shape dissolving into an anonymous wall of stone.
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Critical Thinking
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