The Cricket in Times Square — Chapter 6

About This Passage

This passage performs a quiet but remarkable epistemological move: it shows a character accepting a story as 'sort of' true on the basis of its fit with his own prior intuition rather than on the basis of historical or scientific evidence. Chester does not believe the Hsi Shuai story because he has confirmed it; he believes it because the story names a feeling he had already been carrying — that 'there was more to his song than just chirping.' This is an old way of believing things, the way the ancient world believed myths and the way many traditional cultures still believe the stories they tell about themselves. It is also remarkably honest about how belief actually works for most of us most of the time: we accept stories that match our experience and reject stories that don't, and the matching is more powerful than any abstract argument. The phrase 'sort of believed' is the key — it captures the precise epistemological status of this kind of belief, neither full conviction nor pure skepticism, but a middle position in which a story is held as probably-true because it makes sense of something we had already felt. Copying this passage trains a writer to notice how belief is often a recognition rather than a deduction, and how stories work on us by naming what we already half-knew.

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 has now embedded two ancient stories in two consecutive chapters: the Orpheus myth in Chapter 5 (told by Mr. Smedley) and the Hsi Shuai story in Chapter 6 (told by Mr. Sai Fong). Both stories explain Chester to Mario by placing the cricket in an ancient lineage. Why would an author working in 1960 American children's literature load his book with so much classical and folkloric material? What is the cumulative effect of these embedded stories?
2. Chester 'sort of believed' the Hsi Shuai story because it matched a feeling he had already been carrying. Is this kind of belief — belief based on fit with prior intuition — a legitimate way of knowing things, or is it a fallacy of confirmation bias? Argue for your position with attention to the difference between believing a story because it explains your experience and believing a story because you wish it were true.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide