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Copywork
About This Passage
Kate DiCamillo intercuts two soundtracks in the same paragraph: Mercy's appetite and the Watsons' distress. The reader hears both; Mercy hears only one. This is dramatic irony performed at the level of sentence-by-sentence interleaving — every line of distress is immediately followed by a line of appetite, and the appetite never registers the distress.
Mercy's stomach growled in disappointment. 'Boom. Crack.' 'Help us!' Mrs. Watson called. Mercy thought very hard. Where could she get a snack? And the answer came to her: Baby Lincoln always had sugar...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what the author wanted you to notice about how Mercy thinks. What techniques carry that meaning?
Discussion Questions
- Kate DiCamillo could have written two separate scenes — one of Mercy hunting for toast, one of the Watsons calling for help. Instead she puts both in the same paragraph, line by line. What is the rhetorical effect of forcing the reader to hold both scenes simultaneously? Why is intercutting more powerful than narrative separation here?
- The phrase 'Mercy thought very hard' is jarring when applied to a pig. Each successive chapter has granted Mercy a slightly larger interior — 'decided,' 'dreaming,' 'hungry,' now 'thought very hard.' What is Kate DiCamillo doing by accumulating verbs of inner life on Mercy? Is the author building a serious philosophical claim about animal consciousness, or simply being funny?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
the felt absence of an expected good
Item 2
a literary or cinematic technique of alternating between two simultaneous scenes
Item 3
produced a low, rumbling sound — used here of an empty stomach
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Critical Thinking
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