Summer of the Monkeys — Chapter 16

About This Passage

The moment of payment in a book about wanting money is rendered in five unadorned clauses — each one a small physical act, none of them interior commentary. Rawls refuses all the classical pressures on this scene: no gloating, no moralizing, no dawn of materialist self-recognition. The boy who has pursued the bounty all summer receives it as an event that happens TO his hands rather than as a triumph of his will. The three verbs 'stacked,' 'folded,' 'crammed' trace a downward motion — palm, pocket, out of sight — and enact the disappearance of the money into the rest of the boy's life. Rawls has chosen to make the transaction visible and the transformation invisible.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 16 as a four-movement symphonic structure: (1) the Grandpa's-store scene — the run, the telegram, the candy sack, the disclosure that Jay Berry changed his fairy-ring wish; (2) the domestic night — Papa and Jay Berry checking the monkeys, Mama's Red Sea reading, Jay Berry's divided dreams; (3) the arrival of the Johnson Brothers — truck, embrace, payment, lifetime passes, farewell; (4) the closing courtyard — six dollars to Daisy, Mama's pause and sanction, Jay Berry's melancholy naming of 'the summer of the monkeys.' Track the theological seeds Rawls plants — the Exodus reading, Papa's earlier storm-speech — that this chapter quietly invokes.

Discussion Questions

1. Rawls composes Jay Berry's night of dreams as a tight juxtaposition: the corn crib on fire with monkeys screaming, Jimbo opening the door and the monkeys escaping, and then Jay Berry riding a beautiful pony up into the clouds. In dream-logic, which of these is the wish and which is the fear — and what does the arrangement imply about what Jay Berry's unconscious has already understood that his waking mind has not yet admitted?
2. The chapter ends with a braid of contradictory sensations: a pocket full of money and a melancholy so soft the narrator has trouble naming it — 'a strange feeling came over me. I should have been very happy but I wasn't.' What does this small unresolved dissonance suggest about Rawls's understanding of desire, and why does the title of the whole novel get spoken aloud for the first time in exactly this moment of gain-inflected-by-loss?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide