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This begins the second week of discussion on A Box of Matches. Make sure you have worked through the Study Questions on your own, and have also read last week’s contributions to the critical conversation on this novel.
For your primary post in this thread, you have several options: a) choose a research-based study question or b) an intertextual or comparative study question not already covered adequately, or c) an original comparison-based or research-based question of your own to respond to. For your second post, respond substantively to someone else’s post with additional textual evidence, a counterargument, or additional research.The best contributions are mini-arguments: thesis or claim, plus supporting evidence, plus implications.
If you intend on doing a. A research question) then these are the following research questions you could work with assigned by the professor.
6. It could be said that this novel is a contemporary or postmodern take on more
commonplace or more prosaic “How to Build a Fire” texts—such as those in Boy Scout manuals or on “Survivorman” TV shows—or even an extended homage to Jack London’s famous short story, “To Build a Fire” (which is provided for you in the folder for this novel). London’s story is about extreme, desperate survival in the Yukon wilderness. How is A Box of Matches fundamentally different from these analogues in its imaginative scope and purposes? How is it fundamentally similar, unexpectedly? [R]
9. The narrator seems a bit strange, maybe neuro-atypical. Baker himself has (and
acknowledges) many similar eccentricities that show up in his other writings. Do some research on the author to discover some of these characteristics, not only to compare him to his narrator in this novel (who is not Baker but a construct), but also to discuss how he uses these unusual traits strategically and thematically. Maybe you could consider whether this highly individual man is in some sense an ‘Everyman,’ or a stand-in for all of us in our magnificent variety. Or not…. [R]
10. So, this is also a domestic novel, isn’t it? It’s stage is the home and the family. But it plays on our expectations in sly and artful ways. Talk about how Baker takes the conventions of the domestic novel and spins or subverts them (and also selectively honors them) for his imaginative purposes. What do you find surprising about this novel’s relationship to the domestic novel tradition? It might help to use one or two more traditional domestic novels as benchmarks. [R]
11. There is a long tradition of poems, prayers, novels, allegories, and essays premised on a speaker contemplating the place of man in the universe (of space and time) from a perspective of one alone in the dark. Three examples are Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight” and Paul Auster’s novel Man in the Dark. If you know any of these, or another in a similar vein, construct a thoughtful intertextual reading of A Box of Matches. [R]
12. The narrator is a man with interesting reading preferences and habits. He mentions liking specific Robert Service’s poems, editing medical textbooks, reading Kipling, reading users’ manuals, and other kinds of texts. Zero in on some of these passages that mention or allude to other texts, research what you can, and explain what you think these details tell us about him and about Baker’s larger themes in the novel. [R]
16. Emmett’s morning reveries lead to some wildly imaginative fantasies. One (pp. 20-21, on the fifth day) is reminiscent of a famous story by Julio Cortazar called “A Continuity of Parks.” See if you can find it to compare to Emmett’s version. Any thoughts on Emmett’s brain, or Baker’s?? [R] Why does Emmett riff on suicide?
21. What does this book have in common with one of the following?: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Thoreau’s Walden, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall” (“Margaret, Are you Grieving?…), Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” [R]
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