NOTE: We won’t have class on Friday, so Wednesday will not only finish our discussion of the book, but will be a last chance to discuss ideas for the paper (due on Monday). I’ll also give you a head’s up about the rest of the semester. We’re almost done!
Answer TWO of the following:
Q1: In Chapter 49, the “Clarinet” admits that she finds
Shakespeare “inadequate” to their situation, and when challenged to write
something better, she starts writing a play of her own (which is later mistaken
for a suicide note). Why might the Clarinet’s voice be an important naysayer
for the Symphony, and an important voice for any culture? What might be the
danger of only performing the past?
Q2: Why does Kirsten commemorate the men she killed as knife
tattoos? For someone who doesn’t want to remember her past, and hopes never to
kill anyone again, it seems a strange thing to memorialize. Related to this,
why didn’t she want to tell Francois (the newspaper writer) about them?
Q3: Both Kirsten and the Prophet were about the same age
when the Flu appeared. Both had similar experiences, reflected in the Prophet’s
admission that “I have seen such darkness, such shadows and horrors” (301). And
both, of course, are the “children” of Arthur—the Prophet his actual son, and
Kirsten his stage daughter. So why did they turn out so differently? What saved
Kirsten from becoming the Prophet, or someone like him? And what doomed him
from becoming more like her?
Q4: Do you feel the novel ends with a sense of hope or a sense of loss? Do we feel that Elizabeth (the Prophet’s mother) was right when she said, “It always passes”? Can civilization come back from the brink? Or was it destined to be a faded memory or a myth of another world? Is the beauty of the past that it can really never return?
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