Percy Jackson - The Last Olympian — Chapter 1

About This Passage

This passage rewards careful reading. The first sentence is enormous (the end of the world). The second is small (a great afternoon). The third introduces a minor rule violation. The fourth introduces the people who allow it. The fifth and sixth sentences are doing the most interesting work — Percy is making the case that the rule violation is actually reasonable given his unusual life, and the case is offered with a kind of weary self-awareness that the rest of the chapter will not lose. Notice how Riordan never has to TELL us that Percy is older now. The voice does the work — confident, comic, faintly tired, capable of irony about his own life.

Narration Prompt

Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use to create that effect?

Discussion Questions

1. Percy describes Paul's reasoning for letting him drive (a few hundred yards in a Prius is not the most dangerous thing Percy has done). The reasoning is funny and also true. What does this suggest about how Percy now thinks of his own life — and about how the adults around him have learned to think of him?
2. The chapter opens with an enormous claim ('the end of the world started') and immediately shrinks to a small ordinary scene. Is this a literary trick, or is Riordan saying something about how big events actually arrive in human lives? When the most important moments of your own life have happened, did they announce themselves dramatically, or did they slip in alongside ordinary days?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide