Summer of the Monkeys — Chapter 2

About This Passage

This passage was chosen because it stages the central moral gesture of the chapter: an elder proving a device safe by offering his own body to it. Rawls writes the scene with striking economy — three lines of contracting silence, the closed eyes of both characters, the snap, the jump, and then the chuckle that reopens the world. The rhythm enacts the ethical structure: the teacher takes the risk first, the student waits in darkness, and the verdict comes not from instruments but from the teacher's own laughter. Copying this passage trains the student-writer to build a moral tableau out of plain verbs — tripped, snapped, jumped, chuckled — without a single abstract word.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 2 in a paragraph — Jay Berry's arrival at the store, Grandpa's double-portrait (outside/inside), the revelation of the circus-train wreck, the staggered reward structure ($2 per monkey / $100 for the chimpanzee), the engineering of the padded trap, Grandpa's finger-test, and the two concealed gifts that close the chapter.

Discussion Questions

1. Rawls constructs Grandpa's portrait as a rhetorical argument: five sentences of unflattering external description, then a single-sentence pivot to the inner man ('It was the inside of my grandpa that really counted'). Analyze the deliberateness of this structure. What moral test does the author set for his reader, and how does the disproportion (five to one) itself perform a thesis about how persons should be read?
2. When Jay Berry asks Grandpa why they must keep the monkey business secret, Grandpa answers that 'every farmer in these hills will quit farming and start hunting monkeys.' Evaluate Grandpa's reasoning against the ethics of community versus individual. Is his secrecy a form of stewardship over a fragile subsistence economy, or is it a paternalistic decision that wrongly forecloses his neighbors' agency? Rawls does not resolve this — why not?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide