Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
Kate DiCamillo plants the chapter's central conflict in a quiet observation that the prose never names. Mr. Watson opens the passenger door; Mercy occupies the driver's seat. The mismatch is structural; the silence about it is rhetorical. The reader is trusted to do the noticing.
Every Saturday, Mr. Watson opens the passenger door. Mercy hops into the car. She sits behind the wheel. She snuffles contentedly.
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary, then identify the single most important moment and explain why it matters to the book.
Discussion Questions
- Kate DiCamillo refuses to name the passenger/driver mismatch in chapter 1. The mismatch is in plain sight, but the prose never points at it. Eva Brann insisted that the best questions pursue interpretive puzzles. Here is one: why is the unspoken conflict more powerful than the spoken one would be?
- The book opens on a weekly ritual. Wendell Berry argues throughout his fiction that the daily acts of love between members of a household are the form of devotion that ordinary humans practice when they are not in church. Is the Watsons' Saturday a small domestic liturgy in Berry's sense?
+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
a patterned action repeated for symbolic and relational meaning
Item 2
present in a text without being named
Item 3
a patterned action whose meaning lies in repetition
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide
Get the complete study guide — free
Sign up and get your first book with every chapter included. Copywork, discussion questions, vocabulary, and critical thinking.
Sign up free