Answer each question using complete sentences and correct grammar. Your answers should be comprehensive and reflect the fact that you have closely read and thought about the story. Your grade will be based on this
1. What is different about this narrator from the others we’ve encountered so far? What makes this narrator different or unique?
2. What, exactly, is the source of conflict in the story? Is there a protagonist? An antagonist? Is there a plot?
3.Tell me how you interpret the narrator’s description of happiness in the following passage: “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.–they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter.”
4. The narrator asks us, “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?” After we are introduced to the suffering child, the narrator asks, “Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?” Why is the narrator doing this?
5. If the story is a dystopian satire, if it ridicules some aspect of our society by imagining a fantasy version of it, what is it pointing out? What is the message of this story?
6. If the story is an allegory, who or what is represented by the people who walk away from the town? What would be the place “even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness”?
