Summer of the Monkeys — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Trace Chapter 2 as an integrated teaching event. Jay Berry arrives at the store; Rawls delivers Grandpa's double-portrait (five sentences of exterior, one pivot-sentence of interior); Grandpa reveals the circus-train wreck, the escaped thirty, the staggered reward ($2 per monkey, $100 for the chimpanzee); the two plan together, build a padded steel trap, and Grandpa tests it on his own finger; the chapter closes with two off-ledger gifts (the meat rind disguised as debt, the candy concealed in the grocery sack).

Discussion Questions

1. Rawls's portrait of Grandpa — five sentences of unflattering exterior followed by a single pivot-sentence on the inner man — is structurally a rhetorical test for the reader. Discuss how this five-to-one disproportion performs the novel's argument about how persons are to be read, and compare it to other traditions of delayed apprehension: the prologue of the Gospel of John, the opening of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, the slow-revelation technique of Chekhov's character sketches. What is lost when contemporary fiction rushes the reader to identification?
2. Grandpa's insistence that the monkey-hunt be kept secret rests on his reading of incentive behavior in a subsistence community: 'If word gets out, every farmer in these hills will quit farming and start hunting monkeys.' Analyze this as a case study in the tension between individual agency and collective welfare. Is Grandpa engaging in benevolent stewardship of a fragile economy, or is he enacting a quietly paternalistic withholding of information that, in more contemporary frameworks, might be called an epistemic injustice? Why does Rawls leave the question unresolved?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide