Hillbilly Elegy Essay Questions

What is the Section 8 law mentioned in the book, and how do Vance and his grandmother see it helping or hurting the community?

In the book, Vance and Mamaw mention that some of their neighbors are on Section 8. The term Section 8 refers to the Housing Act of 1937, which provided poor people with housing. According to Section 8, low-income families are given vouchers they can use to pay the rent. In this way, the state helps low-income families secure proper housing and protects the people who rent to low-income families, since it guarantees to pay them the rent owed by the low-income families should they be unable to pay it. When Mamaw mentions Section 8, she is torn between praising the government for trying to help the low-income families and criticizing some families for relying too much on the government to take care of them.

What are some of the values promoted by the hillbillies? How do these values inform the themes and broader messages of the book?

One of the main themes in the book is the specific lifestyle and values of the hillbillies. Among the values promoted by the hillbillies are honesty and family above all. Because of this, many become violent when they believe that their families are under attack. Vance, for example, remembers an instance in which someone called his Uncle Pet's mother a "bitch," and Uncle Pet ended up beating the man, almost killing him. The man who was beaten, however, refused to press charges, knowing that what he did was unforgivable in the community where he lived. '

This example is indicative of another flawed value shared by many hillbillies: fighting in the name of one's family. Indeed, Vance's family sanctions violence as long as it is committed in the name of helping one's family, but this causes many problems for the Vances: namely, that brutality and fighting become part of the family's cultural DNA. Vance himself struggles with his learned fight-or-flight tendencies throughout the book and wonders whether he can ever really escape from the values he learned from his hillbilly family. Of course, he doesn't seek to shed his hillbilly values entirely, as the support he received from his family was the reason he succeeded and became a lawyer.

How does Vance support his claim that the problem the hillbillies face is a sociological one?

After returning from Iraq and seeing the lifestyle and the problems people faced there, Vance reached the conclusion that the hillbilly community faces a sociological problem. Vance notes that, despite the opportunities the hillbillies are presented with, they seem to be at a cultural standstill, unable to escape from a vicious circle of drugs and poverty. Vance claims that the problem is that the hillbilly community has lost trust in its cultural, political, and social institutions and thus remains pessimistic about its chances for upward mobility. This, argues Vance, is a sociological problem that needs to be addressed through policy and grassroots kindness and support, but also with some changes in public policy.

By the end of the book, how does Vance ultimately feel about the hillbilly code of honor he was taught to obey as a child? What has led him to this sentiment?

Vance spends much of his book describing the hillbilly code of honor, wherein one is to end a fight when someone else starts one, and to defend one's family at all costs. Throughout the book, Vance criticizes such a brutal approach to solving problems, even though he grew up being entertained by stories of his family's famed successes in fighting, like that of his grandfather's cousin in the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. He criticizes these ideals because they were the very tendencies that traumatized him as a child, as he had to endure numerous fights between his various father figures and his mother, who had, in turn, learned this brutal approach to interpersonal relationships from her violent parents. Later in life, he realizes his mother's misguided, reckless behavior, while entertaining, is learned; as such, he can choose to rise above this behavior and become perhaps the first peaceful, responsible man in his family. Even so, he admits at the end of the book that the ability to fight back when attacked is a survival tactic when growing up in the sometimes hostile Appalachian communities from which he hails. Nonetheless, Vance takes comfort in the sense of control he derives from being able to resist fighting as an accomplished, capable adult.

Does Vance ultimately believe in the mythical American Dream by the end of his journey? If so, how does he believe children from similar backgrounds can achieve it?

Although Vance seems ultimately confident that the American Dream can work for some, he believes it is only currently possible for some people, and certainly paints it as a "two steps forward, one step back" journey. Vance presents his grandparents, for example, as people so faithful that they can have a piece of the American Dream by moving from socially decaying Jackson, Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, earning better jobs and middle-class lives for their children. Although this certainly occurs in some senses, such as the large house and nice cars the family owns in Middletown, they also bring with them some of the hillbilly tendencies towards brutality and harshness from Kentucky, thus impeding their children's path towards the kind of middle-class prosperity Mamaw and Papaw believed they had secured for them.

Eventually, Vance breaks this cycle of backwards-and-forwards class mobility by applying himself to academia and eventually setting his sights on an Ivy-League school. Still, he recognizes that he was very lucky to have the support of his grandmother, sister, and (to some extent) his mother while doing so, and admits that, without this, such success would have been impossible. This is Vance's chief conclusion in the book: communities must begin nurturing their children's success, shedding the destructive tendencies they learned at an early age and taking responsibility for their actions (rather than blaming the government or the media for their misfortune).