The Cricket in Times Square — Chapter 2

About This Passage

This passage is a study in the layered architecture of literary comparison. Selden begins with a simile (violin), offers a parallel simile with higher classical register (harp), then leaps into an elaborate counterfactual (a leaf falling at midnight in a distant forest) before returning to grounded memory (Long Island, low sun, yellow fingers, tall grass). The four comparisons are arranged in a specific cognitive sequence: familiar object, classical object, imagined scene, remembered scene. The effect is to guide the reader's inner ear through increasing degrees of distance and specificity until, by the final image, we are standing beside Mario in a meadow we have never visited but can somehow hear. Notice also the personification embedded in the final description: the low sun 'reached long yellow fingers through the tall grass.' The sun has hands and arms; it reaches, it touches. Selden is doing what the Romantic poets did — making the natural world feel like an animate companion to human experience — but doing it inside a 20th-century children's book set partly in the Times Square subway. Copying this passage trains a writer to understand how metaphor can escalate, how memory can anchor imagination, and how a single animated verb ('reached') can turn a weather description into an encounter.

Narration Prompt

Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.

Discussion Questions

1. Chapter 2 stages the transformation of an anonymous sound into a named, protected, belonging creature. This movement — from phenomenon to being to member — is structurally the same as the theological pattern of election (the unknown becomes chosen becomes beloved). Is it defensible to read Mario's finding of the cricket as a secular version of an election narrative, or is that an over-reading of a simple rescue scene? Defend your position with specific textual evidence.
2. Selden's description of the cricket's chirp uses four comparisons in escalating order: violin, harp, counterfactual leaf, remembered meadow. Consider whether this sequence constitutes a deliberate rhetorical figure (classical gradatio) or whether the similarity to gradatio is accidental. What would change about our reading of Selden if we accepted that he is using classical rhetorical figures with conscious craft in a children's book?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide