The Cricket in Times Square — Chapter 3

About This Passage

This passage performs the first act of genuine hospitality in the book, and it does so through a sequence of small physical actions and quiet interior responses. Notice the structure: an action (biting the liverwurst in half, giving the bigger part), a verbal reaction (Chester's 'that's very nice of you'), an interior reaction (Chester was 'touched'), and then the revealing detail (nothing for three days). The verb 'touched' is doing important work — it is borrowed from the physical vocabulary of contact (touch = the sense that registers being touched) and applied to an emotional state. Chester has not been literally touched by Tucker, but something has crossed the distance between them and registered on Chester's heart the way a hand registers on the skin. This is the small miracle of hospitality: the transformation of strangers into friends by means of a shared morsel of food. Copying this passage teaches a writer how physical gifts can become emotional events, and how a single well-chosen verb can turn an action into a feeling.

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 structures the chapter around the telling of a story: Tucker asks, Chester tells, Tucker reacts, Chester tells more. The result is a chapter made almost entirely of dialogue and remembered action, with very little happening in the present except for the act of storytelling itself. Why would an author write a whole chapter in which the main event is one creature telling another creature where he came from? What does this structural choice reveal about what Selden thinks makes a friendship?
2. In Chapter 1, Tucker was described as loving eavesdropping almost more than anything else. In Chapter 3, we see him listening raptly to a story he has been invited to hear. Is there a meaningful difference between eavesdropping and listening to an offered story, and does Tucker seem to recognize the difference? The text itself gives us Tucker's own phrase — 'it was almost as much fun as eavesdropping, if the story was true' — as evidence. What does this phrase reveal about Tucker's moral framework?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide