The Cricket in Times Square — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 2 with attention to its four movements — solitary listening, discovery, cleaning, and family negotiation — and evaluate how each movement contributes to the novel's emerging argument about attention, care, and cross-species regard. Which movement, in your reading, bears the greatest interpretive weight, and why?

Discussion Questions

1. Selden's three-simile description of the cricket's chirp (violin, harp, falling leaf in a midnight forest) constitutes what we might call a hierarchy of metaphor rising from urban-instrumental toward pastoral-mythic. The paragraph ends in a conditional ('IF a leaf ... IT MIGHT HAVE sounded like that'). Read this structure as argument rather than ornament. What thesis about the relationship between industrial space and natural delicacy does the paragraph's grammar enact, and what does the narrator's retreat into counterfactual hypothesis accomplish that a direct description could not?
2. The cleaning sequence — 'ever so softly he tapped the hard black shell, and the antennae, and legs, and wings' — is enumerated at a length the plot does not require. Defend the position that this passage is the ethical center of the chapter. What is Selden claiming, through form rather than precept, about the relationship between specificity of attention and moral regard? Engage with whether you find this claim sufficient as a basis for ethical education, or whether the novel's refusal of explicit moral argument represents a pedagogical limitation.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide