The One and Only Ivan — Chapter 1

Narration Prompt

Summarize the book's narrative arc, then identify the central tension and evaluate whether the author handles it honestly.

Discussion Questions

1. The novel gives Ivan a narrative voice of extraordinary literary precision — metaphor, irony, understatement — while arguing through its plot that Ivan cannot communicate with humans without Julia's mediation. Examine this tension between what the form claims and what the narrative demonstrates. Is this a contradiction that undermines the novel, or a deliberate structural irony that constitutes its deepest argument?
2. The vine metaphor for homesickness — 'comforting, strangling' — posits attachment to what has been lost as simultaneously life-sustaining and lethal. Evaluate this as a general claim about displacement: is Applegate arguing that the displaced are always caught between the nourishment and the destruction of what they remember?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide