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Copywork
About This Passage
Two sentences enact the central technique of all sustained narrative suspense: dramatic irony built on parallel structure. Kate DiCamillo gives us 'so busy sleeping... did not hear' and then immediately repeats the shape with 'so busy dreaming... did not hear.' The repetition does two things at once — it ritualizes the household's peace AND sets a rhythmic pattern that the next chapter will break. This is how minor prose moments do major structural work.
Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson and Mercy were all so busy sleeping that they did not hear the bed creak. They were all so busy dreaming that they did not hear the floor moan.
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Discussion Questions
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
- Kate DiCamillo dedicates an entire chapter — small as the form allows — to the dreams of three sleeping characters. The chapter has no plot. The author could easily have cut it. Why does she keep it? What is being accomplished here that no plot-action could accomplish?
- Each dream is a small act of self-revelation. Mr. Watson dreams of driving fast (a fantasy unfulfilled); Mrs. Watson dreams of feeding Mercy (a routine fulfilled); Mercy dreams of being fed (also routine, also fulfilled). Augustine writes that the soul is most truly itself in what it cannot stop wanting. By the Augustinian standard, what kind of soul is each Watson? Whose interior life does the chapter rank highest?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
the literary technique in which the audience is given information the characters lack, generating suspense without violating the characters' interiority
Item 2
the deliberate use of matched grammatical patterns to create rhythm, emphasis, and reader expectation
Item 3
the literary device of attributing human qualities to non-human or inanimate things — see the moaning floor
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Critical Thinking
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