The Cricket in Times Square — Chapter 1

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter's narrative arc, then identify the central tension Selden has set up in this opening and evaluate whether he handles it honestly.

Discussion Questions

1. Selden's opening establishes a philosophical claim by structural implication: that genuine attention is only possible in emptiness, and that the small voices which most need to be heard can only be heard by watchers who have nothing else to do. Is this claim defensible beyond the book? Is it romantic nostalgia for pre-industrial silence, or is it a real observation about the epistemology of attention in dense environments?
2. The chapter's rhetorical architecture rests on a classical priamel — the catalog of familiar sounds that culminates in the singular unfamiliar one. Sappho uses the device to assert a personal philosophy; Selden uses it to introduce a plot event. What does this difference reveal about the adaptation of classical rhetorical forms into 20th-century children's literature? Is Selden's use of the device an inheritance, a borrowing, or an accidental convergence?

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