Summer of the Monkeys — Chapter 4

About This Passage

This passage was chosen because it is the exact moment Jay Berry loses the moral high ground he has been trying to keep all day. Rawls traces the anger kinesthetically — from the feet, through the body, exploding in the head — so the reader can feel how a feeling moves before a person acts on it. Notice the two voices inside the passage: the narrator who watches himself burn, and the fourteen-year-old who shouts accusations. A skilled writer learns here that anger has geography. Rawls does not say 'I got angry' — he shows where the anger started and where it ended up.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 4 in your own words, with attention to its sequence of humiliations: the sleepless night, the dream of monkeys with price tags, the first failed trap run, the stick-and-trap outsmarting, the stolen gunny sack, the beanshooter, and the reversed chase at the end.

Discussion Questions

1. Papa tells Jay Berry that 'it's not good for a boy to want something with all his heart and then be disappointed.' By the end of the chapter, has Papa's warning proved right? Is it a parent's job to warn a child against hope, or is hope something children must learn about by being hurt by it?
2. The big monkey uses two separate strategies across the chapter — first avoiding the traps, then springing them on purpose with a stick. What does this pattern of ADAPTATION show about the monkey's intelligence that a single clever act would not? In what ways is the monkey behaving more like a person than like an animal?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide