The Cricket in Times Square — Chapter 1

About This Passage

Selden is doing three things in this passage simultaneously. First, he personifies the station — it 'waits' and has an 'emptiness,' vocabulary usually reserved for living beings with inner states. Second, he pivots from the impersonal setting to a specific human figure (Mario on his stool) by way of a single looking-verb: 'Tucker Mouse looked back at Mario.' That verb relocates the reader's attention and binds the two descriptions together — the emptiness of the station is not separate from the boy sitting in the middle of it; it surrounds him. Third, the sentence about the magazines 'displayed as neatly as he knew how to make them' is an act of characterization: it tells us Mario cares, that he is young enough to be proud of his effort, and that his best is still a boy's best — not an adult merchant's. Copying this teaches a writer how a scene can move from the cosmic scale (a station with an atmosphere) to the human scale (a boy doing his best at something small) without breaking stride.

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?

Discussion Questions

1. Selden opens not with the boy but with the mouse, and then has the mouse do the watching. What does this reversal of expected scale — small creature as observer of large boy — accomplish that a conventional opening (Mario sitting at the stand, Tucker noticed later) could not? What is gained, and what is risked?
2. The chapter devotes a long paragraph to cataloguing every sound Tucker has ever heard in New York, and then insists that the new sound is unlike any of them. Construct the strongest argument that the author is making a claim about the limits of what a city can produce — that no matter how rich a city's soundscape, something essential from elsewhere can still be missing.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide