Walk Two Moons Essay Questions

Explain how Walk Two Moons can be classified as a frame-tale narrative.

Walk Two Moons is a story-within-a-story. Sal, the narrator, tells both stories in the past tense; she's narrating from a future perspective, meaning she's already experienced everything that happens in the novel. But there are two layers of the past in Walk Two Moons, and two separate timelines. The earlier timeline begins when Sal and John move from Bybanks, Kentucky to Euclid, Ohio. That story is about Sal's friendship with Phoebe and their wild theories about and "investigations" into Norma Winterbottom's disappearance. During this time, Sal is also grieving her mother's death and failing to come to terms with the fact that her mother will not return. After the resolution of Norma Winterbottom's story, Sal and her grandparents go on a cross-country road trip to Lewiston, Idaho, where Sal's mother is buried. This road trip is the later timeline. On this road trip, Sal tells the story contained in the earlier timeline. The road trip frames the story of Euclid, but it is, itself, a story too, and the events and consequences of the frame-tale are thematically linked to the events and consequences of the framed tale. The two timelines are braided together and culminate in a one-chapter denouement, which is told in the present tense.

Compare and contrast the story of Sal's mother leaving and the story of Norma Winterbottom leaving.

Sal's mother, Chanhassen, and Phoebe's mother, Norma, share similar reasons for leaving. They both feel limited by their domestic roles as wives and mothers. They both feel like they've lost sight of their individual identities and that they need space and some temporary distance from their families in order to figure who they are as individuals. Their reasons for leaving differ. Chanhassen is depressed after a miscarriage that results in an emergency hysterectomy and renders her unable to have more children. When she's no longer able to have children, she and her husband's goal of having a huge family is suddenly complicated and feels like an impossibility, which forces her to reevaluate who she is without this goal of prolific motherhood. She also feels threatened and insufficient in the face of her husband's extreme consideration and kindness. She doesn't feel "good enough" to be a Hiddle. Norma, on the other hand, lives with a supremely inconsiderate husband and two daughters who take her for granted. She leaves when she's found by her son, Mike, who she gave up for adoption when he was still an infant before she met her husband, George. Interestingly, both Norma and Chanhassen cut their hair short before they leave; this could be interpreted as a severance from their old identity, or as a subversion of mainstream gender roles and expectations. In any case, they both change their appearance as they embark on a new chapter in their lives.

At the end of the novel, Sal says, "lately, I've been wondering if there might be something hidden behind the fireplace, because just as the fireplace was behind the plaster wall and my mother's story was behind Phoebe's, I think there was a third story behind Phoebe's and my mother's, and that was about Gram and Gramps" (274). Explain how the story of Gram and Gramps relates to Sal's and Phoebe's story.

Gram and Gramps's story is a third-order framed-tale, albeit much shorter and less essential to the novel as a whole than Sal's and Phoebe's stories—it is nonetheless a significant nested story in Walk Two Moons. Among the consequences of the road trip is Gram's death; she is bitten by a cottonmouth snake and suffers a stroke a few days later. Sal learns from Gram and Gramps's back-and-forth that they each had people outside of their marriage who were either romantically interested in them, or with whom they were romantically involved. Gram's friend Gloria has always had her eye on Gramps, and Gram allegedly ran off with "the egg man" for three days and three nights before returning to Gramps. Gram recalls a love letter the egg man wrote for her and tells Sal, on the road, that it's the only love letter she's ever been written. Gramps writes Gram a love letter while she's dying in the hospital in Coeur d'Alene. They bury Gram in Bybanks, in the aspen grove where she and Gramps were wed. It seems that Sal is making a connection between the lessons learned by the Winterbottoms and Gram and Gramps's marriage which, despite its bumps and obstacles, prevailed and, in the end, overflowed with love and affection.

What is the significance of "respectability" in Walk Two Moons? According to the novel, is it good to be "respectable"?

At the beginning of the novel, Sal briefly refers to Chanhassen's family, the Pickfords. Sal recalls asking her mother why her Grandmother Pickford never laughed, and her mother replies, "They're just so busy being respectable. It takes a lot of concentration to be that respectable" (15). Respectability seems, according to the novel, to come at the cost of warmth, acceptance, and openness. In other words, for Creech, "respectable" is somewhat of a code word for "uptight." The Winterbottoms are described in terms of their "respectability," and when Norma explains why she never told her family about her son, she cites her primary reason as being afraid they would see her as "unrespectable." When George, responding to her reason, says, "To hell with respectable!" (248) it represents a major turning point for the Winterbottoms, a point at which they're able to finally focus on each other rather than the image they project to the rest of the world.

Why would Sharon Creech wait until the end of the novel to finally explicitly reveal Chanhassen's death? How does this influence the reader's relationship to Sal?

Sal never acknowledges her mother's death because she's in denial. The sense of urgency she feels on the trip to Lewiston comes from the belief that if they arrive on Chanhassen's birthday, there is a chance that she can bring her back. So, before she actually sees Chanhassen's gravesite for herself, she doesn't believe that Chanhassen is actually dead. If at any point in the story, any character, whether it were Sal or John or her grandparents, acknowledged Chanhassen's death, the reader would believe them. The reader is not Sal, so they would have no issue believing that her mother died in a bus accident. By keeping the reader in the dark and only feeding them hints and intimations that Chanhassen is no longer alive, Creech invites the reader to experience the sense of finality at the same time as Sal in the Lewiston cemetery.