Essay Questions

The storyline both directly and indirectly revolves around the legacy of Canadian residential schools. What exactly were these?

The narrator’s father is a product of the residential school program and a victim of its comprehensive legacy of induced trauma. Although Larry did not attend one himself, he is also a victim through the bloodline of trauma being passed along through generations. Residential schools serve as an example of why separation of church and state is essential to any democracy: Christianity and the Canadian government established them system jointly in a concerted effort aimed as assimilating the indigenous tribespeople of Canada into the societal construct of their European occupiers.

Assimilation in this sense meant, of course, not just learning a new language, but the rejection of any “pagan” beliefs which the Christian fathers could not figure a way of stealing and incorporating into their own mythology. And, of course, it goes without saying that mixing of religion and education in the creation of adults who were to spend a lot of time with children has been effectively established by now as potent with potential for immediately going off the rails and then being covered up.

How does the novel make an assertive statement about the usefulness of the oral tradition of storytelling which is shared by so many indigenous people whose land was taken by force as a result of European colonization?

One of the go-to knocks against indigenous tribes who had discovered the “New World” thousands of years before anybody ever hear of Columbus is that the very lack of a written historical record of their existence is itself proof enough of genetic inferiority. (Part of this approach also encompasses those who ask how a society that created the pyramids and Notre Dame Cathedral cannot inherently be considered superior to a civilization that had not yet even learned how to build a wooden house.)

The answer, of course, is too complex to get into here, so let’s focus on the centrality of Larry’s “accident” which resulted in massive memory loss. When all is said and done, history is really just memory. If you can’t remember what happened, you have no history, right? Unless, of course, it has been written down or orally conveyed to another who passed it down to the next generation. The book is an assertive statement that the oral tradition of storytelling is every bit as valid a means of preserving the history of a culture as any library filled with bound books.

When Larry is recalling the sadistic incident with the broomstick his father uses as sexual weaponry against his unconscious wife, what is the significance of the recollection that it all took place back then on “a couch like this one" in the present?

The significance of the sordid history of Canada’s residential school system is that the terrors which were enacted upon students actually attending—like Larry’s father—did not end with that generation. Successive generations of kids were impacted by the traumatic events which took place back then even though they never even saw an actual school, much less attended one.

That is the nature of trauma: it doesn’t simply end, but resonates outward like the ripples created when a pebble is dropped in water. The initial harm of the pebble creating a splash is stronger than the waves that spread outward which become less and less intense over time. Simply because the intensity is lessened does not mean that the water is forever different than it was before the pebble dropped. The past continues to impact the future in ever-differing ways, but it is still making an impact. When Larry observes that the horrific event which occurred in the past took place on a couch just like the one he is currently sitting on as he remembers it, he is saying that the dramatic effect of the pebble being dropped back then is still ripping across time and will continue to do for some time to come.