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About This Passage
Burnett gives us, in three compact sentences, a portrait of how a reclusive and rarely-seen child becomes a myth inside his own household. The adverb layering is careful: the descriptions are 'exaggerated,' 'uncanny,' 'fanciful' — three words that do related but distinct work. 'Exaggerated' is a claim about scale (Colin is made larger than he is), 'uncanny' is a claim about category (he is made to feel not-quite-human), and 'fanciful' is a claim about sourcing (the stories are invented rather than observed). Burnett's final clause — 'given by people who had never seen him' — is a quiet indictment of the whole household: the authority to describe Colin has been assumed by those least qualified to describe him.
Mr. Roach was not without curiosity. He had never caught even a glimpse of the boy and had heard a dozen exaggerated stories about his uncanny looks and ways and his insane tempers. The thing he had h...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Chapter 20 as Colin's first real excursion and the household's first sight of the changed boy. Begin with the week of waiting, the careful secret plan, and Dickon's daily visits describing the underworld of badgers and water-rats. Continue with Mr. Roach's summons upstairs, his expectations formed by rumor, and his discovery of a lamb, a crow, a squirrel, and a composed Rajah giving orders. Describe the procession down the Long Walk, Mary's whispered tour of the places where the robin and the key were found, Dickon's splendid push through the ivied door, Colin's covered-eyes entry, and the sensory flood of color and sound and scent that greets him. Close with Colin's declaration that he will get well and live forever.
Discussion Questions
- Burnett describes the rumors about Colin as 'exaggerated,' 'uncanny,' and 'fanciful' — and explicitly notes they came from 'people who had never seen him.' What does the passage reveal about the epistemology of gossip inside a large household, and what does it tell us about the absent adults whose failure of witness left the space that rumor filled?
- Colin has become 'more and more fixed in his feeling that the mystery surrounding the garden was one of its greatest charms.' Develop an account of why the secrecy is not merely incidental to the garden's appeal but constitutive of it. What would be lost if the adults were included, and what is Colin actually protecting?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Represented as larger, worse, or more extreme than is actually true; Burnett's precise word for the household's rumors about Colin
Item 2
Strange in a way that feels unsettlingly outside ordinary categories of the natural; applied to the imagined quality of Colin's looks
Item 3
Produced by imagination rather than observation; invented rather than based in fact — Burnett's assessment of the descriptions of Colin
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Critical Thinking
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