Traveler

Questions for Discussion.

1.  Even though the speaker tells us about Marie D’Agostino, he is able to reveal much about himself in the process.  What do you find out by what he has to say about her?  And do you like him for it?  If he’s so sensitive with women, why do women leave him?

2.  What happens from the very first line is what is called a narrative hook.  How are our suspicions aroused?

3. Nostalgia is strongly suggestive throughout the narrative in a variety of ways.  pg. 24 ” Marie’s passing probably heightened this nostalgia, but the truth is, I’ve been in a period of reexamination for a  while now.  As if by the technique of recall I can make sense of myself.  This is why I say I have an intimate relationship with self.  Self-pity.  Self-centreedness, and, of course, self-absorption.  Actors. Wow.”  Our narrator is to a great degree self aware, but what do you know about him that he does not?

4.  We know the story is in the ’60’s and that our narrator was in Vietnam.  I predict that he’s leading up to a big revelation about what happened to him there.  Instead, the traveler is really about something entirely different.  Was this revelation a let down?  Did you feel cheated by a minor domestic drama?

5.  Has anyone ever read Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business or John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Do you see any similarities?   Who is Jono Riley’s ego? 

6.  What does Jono’s story mean in a wider context? “I think the American retrospective of small-town lives is a cleaned-up version of how we wised we could have been.  How when we were teenagers the political future and raging Vietnam War should have been paramount in our thinking along with all concerns of racial equality and poverty.  I can’t place myself in another community’s shoes.  Maybe the kids in those places were mightily committed to world peace and prosperity.  It sounds good.  It sounds a lot better than what drove our East Providence conversations.  The Beatles, large breasts, baseball, and hockey.”  But there were big issues in this small town nonetheless.  Which made Jono know what it is to be a “guy’s guy” and what was not so right in a small town.  Who were his heros?

7.  Jono is a really sardonic funny guy.  ”"The scoutmaster explained that since they had a troop swim scheduled for after dinner, he thought it would be more efficient for the boys to leave the tags on the boards and let us think that they had all drowned rather than bother to take the tages with them.” pg. 171  Did you see any passages that really worked for you?

8.  The narrative arc spins down in this section, “That world wasn’t going to let us take our sweet time getting into the flow of real life.  It was a sledgehammer of a feeling, and we had seen it coming since spring.  But we didn’t make those silly vows that pass for promises in other places.  We took the traditional East Providence route.  We just pretended it wasn’t happening.  To us anyway.”  Has Jono developed throughout the course of his retrospective?  What about his relationship with his fire-fighting partner Renee?