Book Club Materials

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

I am delighted to offer discussion questions for my novels and short stories with the hope that they will inspire lively discussions in the book clubs or among the individuals who use them. As the moderator of the Classics Book Club of Sevier County (TN) for the past thirteen years, I know very well how important discussion questions can be to the success of club meetings. All the more so, I hope, when the questions are offered by the author.

I have also provided answers to the questions. But I do so with a huge proviso:

BEWARE OF THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY.

While it may be interesting to see how authors interpret their own works, their views should not be regarded as definitive, strange as that may seem. The temptation to do so was warned against by two brilliant literary critics, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, in their 1946 essay “The Intentional Fallacy.”  In brief, these gentlemen argue—correctly, I believe—that the meaning of a literary work cannot be determined either by the reader’s inferences of the author’s intentions or even by the author’s expressed intentions, as may sometimes be found in author forewords, afterwords, essays, letters, etc. Intentions and executions can be very different creatures. Instead, the work must be interpreted by what it actually says. The substance of the text alone prevails.

So it is here. My answers should NOT be regarded as definitive. Rather, they should be regarded as interpretations to be tested against the text of the work just as any other reader’s might be, standing or falling according to the textual evidence. 

 And this feature of criticism should not be regarded as a weakness but rather as a necessary concession to the nature of literature as symbolic. For example, if we compare romantic love to a rose, as Robert Burns does (“My love is like a red, red rose”), we must concede that the comparison is figurative rather than literal. Likewise, the entire plot of a novel may symbolize one or more aspects of human life. In fact, if it is to have any real value, it will do just that. More often than not, as readers, this realization comes over us gradually. At the point this realization manifests itself, which James Joyce called an epiphany (itself a figurative comparison to the Christian Epiphany in which the Christ child is revealed to the Magi), we realize the symbolic meaning of the story that has arisen from the textual details. And that moment is truly magical, even if not everyone agrees with the exact moment or the exact meaning. And therein lies the value of book clubs: a variety of minds focused on one book.