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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is doing a difficult thing in three sentences: it ranks the achievements of the quest in reverse order of obviousness. The first sentence celebrates the most obvious achievement (a powerful magical object). The second sentence identifies the specific use the prize will be put to (saving a tree that is also a girl, which is a strange phrase that quietly names the layered nature of myth). The third sentence performs the inversion — the prize is less important than the people the questers became while questing. This is the inversion that almost every great quest narrative eventually performs, from Tolkien's Frodo who must let go of the One Ring to T.S. Eliot's 'we shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.' Riordan has given his young narrator the ability to articulate this inversion at the end of his second book, and the articulation marks Percy as a hero in the older sense — a hero who knows that the prize is the trip, not the gold.
The Fleece could heal almost anything. We had crossed a sea designed by old gods to kill anyone who tried it, and we were carrying the Fleece home for one specific purpose — to save a tree that was al...
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Discussion Questions
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
- Percy ends the book by ranking the achievements of the quest in reverse order of obviousness — the magical Fleece is the most obvious, the people they have become is the deepest. Is this a real insight about how quests work, or is it the kind of thing characters in books say to make their adventures feel meaningful when really the adventures were mostly about the action? What evidence in the chapter supports one reading or the other?
- Percy nearly loses Tyson during the climactic encounter. The near-loss is what fixes Percy's love for his brother in place. Is this a beautiful narrative pattern, or is it actually a slightly disturbing one — the suggestion that we only love clearly what we have nearly lost? What does the pattern imply about the rest of love, the love we feel for people we have not yet had to fear losing?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A reversal of the usual order, in which what looks most important turns out to be least, and what looked least important turns out to be most
Item 2
A change in identity rather than merely in possession or circumstance, the difference between having more and being different
Item 3
The restoration of relationship after estrangement, often signaled by small gestures rather than grand declarations
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Critical Thinking
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