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Copywork
About This Passage
Eugenia delivers a small monument to confident wrongness. The phrase 'apparently I am the only one' is the language of someone who has converted disagreement into proof of being right. Kate DiCamillo lets the phrasing do the philosophical work; the narrator never names the failure.
'I do think,' said Eugenia, 'that this has something to do with that pig. And I do think, apparently I am the only one around here who does.'
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary, then identify the most important moment.
Discussion Questions
- Eugenia's reasoning is the structural opposite of Officer Tomilello's in chapter 6. Plato in Republic Book VIII describes the tyrannical soul as one that has stopped listening to other voices and converted disagreement into hostility. Is Kate DiCamillo writing a small Platonic portrait of the tyrannical soul through Eugenia?
- Eugenia exhibits confirmation bias — she fits every new event into her belief that Mercy is bad. Across both books, the pattern is consistent. Is the writer staging confirmation bias for the young reader, and what would the reader take away from such a staging?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
the act of assuming without sufficient evidence
Item 2
the tendency to interpret new information as supporting one's existing beliefs
Item 3
in Plato's Republic VIII, the soul that has stopped listening to other voices
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Critical Thinking
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