While you may respond to anything in The Zero that interests you, here are some suggestions:

• What do you think are some of the specific targets of Jess Walter’s satire?  Do you think satire is an appropriate form for a post 9/11 novel?  Does a certain amount of time have to pass before satiric responses to tragedy become viable?
• What do you think Walter gains by structuring the novel around the “gaps” in Brian Remy’s experiences?  What do the gaps seem to suggest metaphorically?  How are they related to the thematic content of the novel?  How do they affect a reader’s experience of the novel?  Do you think they work well as a structuring device or not?
• Discuss any of the domestic situations in the novel–you might look at Remy’s son Edgar, his ex-wife Carla, and her husband Steve.  You might examine Remy’s relationship with April Kraft, or April’s own situation involving her estranged husband and her sister.  Do you think that fragmented families and homes can be metaphors for the larger political situation?
• In the field of contemporary literature, there is often a line drawn between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction”  (with many critics and writers dismissing “genre fiction” as more formulaic and less serious than its more literary cousin).  How does The Zero cross this line?  In other words, how does Walter play with the generic conventions of the detective novel, the thriller, or the police procedural?  Why do you think he might have chosen to do so?
• What is the purpose/function of the man code-named “Jaguar” in the novel?  Why do you think Walter includes this figure?  What did you think of Jaguar’s role at the end of the novel?

Here are some prompts you might want to respond to for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

• What do you think about Oskar’s voice?  Do you find it convincing/authentic?  Several early reviewers praised the voice as the compelling driver of the novel.   Or do you find it inauthentic and annoying, as some other early reviewers  have complained?  What are the advantages, disadvantages in choosing a child narrator?
• Discuss the back story in the novel, the chapters set in Dresden.  Why are they included? What do they add?  How well do you think this structural choice works?  Do you find one narrative thread in the story inherently more interesting than the other?
• Talk about the theme of language and silence in the novel.  You might look at Thomas, Sr., for instance, and the words he has lost.  What does it mean when he says that “every book…is the balance of  YES and NO” (17)?
• Discuss the use of images, blank space, etc. in the novel. How well do you think these visual elements work?  Why do you think Foer chose this format?
• This novel contains numerous letters, texts, and life stories embedded within the story that Oskar is telling.  How do these connect?  Why do you think Foer chooses to include so many first-person narratives within the narrative?

Like always, respond to anything in the book that particularly interested you. Here are some ideas for things you might want to discuss:

• What do you think about the experimental structure of the book?  Do you think it works well or does it seem “gimmicky” to you?  Why do you think O’Brien might have chosen this odd form?
• Discuss a recurring pattern of images in the novel.  You might look, for instance, at fog, mirrors, labyrinths, trapdoors, etc.
• Why do you think O’Brien includes the thematic strand that focuses on magic?
• What do you think is the point of the figure of the biographer/historian, who we’re first introduced to in footnote 21 (p. 30)?
• Why the inclusion in later evidence chapters of massacres at Sandy Creek and Little Big Horn as well as atrocities committed by British infantryman and American soldiers during the American Revolution?
• What do you think happened to Kathy Wade?

Please discuss anything that particularly interested you in The Things They Carried.  Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:

• Choose a particular story and analyze it briefly.  What’s the story about?  What’s striking about the language, style, or presentation of character? Why do you think the story works (or doesn’t work)?
• Discuss the form of the book.  It’s been classified variously as a short story cycle, as a pseudo-memoir, and as a novel.  But perhaps more interesting than what we choose to call the book is how it crosses genre boundaries and subverts readers’ expectations.  Why do you think O’Brien makes the formal choices he does?  Were you ever frustrated in your reading?  What does he gain by such a form?  What does he risk?
• Related to the question above, discuss metafiction and storytelling in the book.  How is this a book that is about narrative itself?
• Talk about the presentation of gender in the book.  Were there particular women characters you were interested in?  How does O’Brien’s presentation of gender and war compare to earlier works we’ve read?
• Choose a specific character such as Jimmy Cross, Rat Kiley, Mary Anne Bell, Norman Bowker, Linda, etc. to analyze in some detail.

While you’re always free to talk about anything that interested you in the novel, here are some prompts you might want to consider for Going After Cacciato:

• “Cacciato” means hunted down or captured in Italian.  Why this name? How is the character described? What do you think he suggests or represents in the novel?
• Discuss the novel’s narrator, Paul Berlin–you might consider his name, his background, his relationship to his father, his “fear biles,” his dreams, etc.
• Choose a specific scene or section, such as falling into the tunnels, Cacciato as a monk in Mandalay, the escape from Tehran, etc. to discuss in detail.  What does this scene add to the novel?
• What are we to think about Sarkin Aung Wan and her relationship with Paul Berlin?
• What happened to Lt. Sidney Martin and what’s unusual about the way the scenes in Lake Country relating to him are described?
• Discuss the book’s complex structure or metafictional elements

Here are some prompts you might want to respond to for Slaughterhouse-Five:

• Do you believe this is an anti-war book or not?  Vonnegut concedes in the opening chapter that trying to stop wars is like trying to stop glaciers.  Is he a fatalist, as some critics have charged, or does he think change is possible?
• What are we supposed to think about the Tralfamadorians and their world-view?  Does Vonnegut believe (and want us to believe) that the Tralfamadorian philosophy of life is more sane and reasonable than that of earthlings?  Or do you believe that Vonnegut satirizes the Tralfamadorian view–that he presents it ironically?
• Talk about the book’s structure and what it means for Billy Pilgrim to “come unstuck in time.”
• Discuss gender and domesticity in the novel.
• Choose a particular scene and provide a close reading of it.  You might look, for instance, at the scene when Billy and Roland Weary get captured, at the British officers’ staging of Cinderella inside the prison camp, at a scene from Billy’s childhood, or at something that takes place in the flying saucer or in the zoo at Tralfamadore.

Please respond to anything in the book that interested you.  Here are some ideas to get you started thinking:

• Discuss the title.  What do you think the image of the cat’s cradle means as we progress through the novel?
• Consider the opening sentence:  “Call me Jonah.”  What are the implications here?
• Is it possible to construe this sentence, that appears in Chapter Four, in a way that makes sense:  “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”  Or is it simply a logical conundrum?
• Discuss Vonnegut’s critique of a science that led to the development of the atom bomb and the Cold War.
• Perhaps the central conundrum of the novel is trying to figure out what our attitude toward Bokonon and Bokononism should be.  Are we meant to reject Bokonon as a charlatan, a false prophet who cruelly and blithely leads human beings to mass suicide at the end of the novel?  Or are we to see him as a kindly and wise spiritual leader who provides people with the hope they need to survive their harsh and unforgiving lives?
• Discuss gender in the novel.  What are we to think of Mona Aamons Monzano and her relationship with the novel’s narrator?  Like many books we will read this semester, the novel depicts a temporary retreat from chaos and destruction into a temporary safe home, although this home is an “oubliette.”  Implications?
• Discuss metafiction in the novel.  What does the book seem to say about art and storytelling?  What about all the books within the book?

Please feel free to respond to anything that particularly interested you in Mother Night.  Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:

• If someone asked you to describe Vonnegut’s style, what would you say?  How would you characterize it?  (Your response will probably be more interesting if you can be as specific as possible–you could look at tone, diction, syntax, point-of-view, use of imagery or figurative language, paragraph or chapter construction, dialogue,  presentation of character, etc.)
• Discuss the purpose and effect of the prefatory material to the novel–the author’s introduction added in 1966 and  the “editor’s note.”
• Campbell tries to retreat with Helga into what he calls a “A Nation of Two,” and he writes plays that are “about as political as chocolate éclairs” (33).  Is such a retreat possible?  Does Vonnegut believe that one can have an apolitical art?  What are we to think of the plays that Campbell produces?
• Discuss what you think the novel says about nationalism.
• What is Vonnegut’s view of the self?   Is it possible to have a “good” self that no one else can see, what Campbell calls “the honest me I hid so deep inside” (39)?
• Discuss role-playing in the novel:  Campbell plays the role of a Nazi; Resi plays Helga (who herself was an actress playing roles Campbell write for her); Potapov plays the role of Kraft, etc.  Why all this performing?  How does it compare to Hemingway’s depiction of identity performance in his novels?
• Do you think that Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is a reliable narrator of his own story?

For today’s blog, please feel free to talk about anything that interested you in A Farewell to Arms.  Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:

• Many critics have talked about the poetic nature of the first two pages of the book and of the first paragraph especially.  Discuss Hemingway’s style and language use in this opening scene or anywhere else in the novel where you the style is particularly key.
• Why do you think Frederic and Catherine have such a strange beginning when they first meet at the hospital where she works near Gorizia?   What’s going on in these scenes?
• Talk about Frederic’s relationship with Rinaldi or the priest.
• How do Frederic’s ideas about the war change as the book progresses?  You might look especially at passages in which he talks to the ambulance mechanics and to the priest in the hospital.  What do you think Hemingway is saying about the war?  Is this an anti-war novel?
• Discuss the character of Catherine Barkley.  Readers of the novel have long disagreed about how we’re to view her.  Is she simply a stereotypical woman, a male fantasy?  What do you think about lines when Catherine says things like this:  “There isn’t any me anymore….just what you want” (end of Ch. 16)?  What about her own history of trauma and her attitude toward the war?  Some commentators have even go so far to see her as the true hero in the book.  Does this reading seem at all plausible to you?
• We’ve talked about characters trying to make “homes” or safe domestic spaces in war.  How is this theme important in the novel?
• Hemingway famously wrote 47 different endings to the novel.  Perhaps provide a close reading of the ending he settled on and speculate about why he chose this one.