Chapter 19
- Orual uses the word “bareface” again in this chapter. Where? Significance?
- How does Trunia react to the mask that Orual wears over her helmet?
- Before the fight, Orual says that she would have given ten talents to any prophet who would have told her what? Significance?
- Orual has been wondering for the last few chapters if the gods will kill or punish her in some other obvious way. Do we have any evidence that this is happening?
- Orual’s disordered love for Psyche comes to the foreground again at the end of the chapter when she retires to her room and realizes how lonely she is (224). What do we learn about her affection for Bardia in the course of the chapter?
- The chapter ends with Orual, who has just killed Argan, thinking, “I am the Queen; I’ll kill Orual too” (225). What does this mean? Based on what you have seen so far in the novel, would you guess that she will be successful in the effort to kill her old self and vanish into the role of queen? Explain your answer.
- Think of a time when you let your fantasy life construct a dream for you and you lived in that dream—or would return to it for comfort whenever you had a free moment. Write about the experience now, explaining how it helped or hurt you.
- Often, different parts of ourselves come to the foreground around different people. The example of Orual and the queen is an extreme one that shows the denial that is in her life. Is there an area in your life where you have done likewise—let two parts of yourself get further and further apart from each other? If you can’t think of an example in your own life, describe an example from someone else’s life.
- What does Orual do for Poobi? What does this reveal about her?
- Name at least one of the books that the Fox buys for Orual’s library.
- What does Orual sometimes feel that she has done once she has walled in the well with the swinging chains that sounds like a girl crying?
- As the Fox gets older, does he care for philosophy or poetry? What might be the significance of this?
- At the beginning of the chapter, the narrator says that Orual became more and more the queen and less and less Orual. What metaphor does she use for this process? Do you find it a helpful one in understanding what is happening in the narrator? Why or why not?
- Why doesn’t Arnom remove the old stone that the people worship as Ungit, even though he wants to? Why does Orual help him to buy the new statue shaped like a woman for the house of Ungit? Does her decision make sense with what you know of her and of the way Ungit is worshipped in Glome?
- One of the stories people tell about Orual’s veil is that she has no face, and if you stripped off the queen’s veil, you’d find emptiness (228). Orual describes this as a story, but is there a way in which it’s true?
- Orual describes how locking a part of herself away because of sorrow and pride caused that part of herself to begin to fade and disappear. What would you advise her to do if you were her friend?
- Why does Orual say she hides the things that she is feeling from the people with whom she travels?
- Based on the evidence in this chapter, what do Orual’s people think of her?
- Orual says that the gods gave her nothing in the world to love but what?
- Revisit the passage beginning “It was as if the gods themselves” and ending “falsities as this” (243-244). Is Orual objecting only to the way the gods have told her story or to something more?
- In this chapter, all the work of walling away Orual over many years begins to be undone. In many books, the reawakening of a self that has been buried is a joyful event. Is that how it is described in this chapter? Give at least one example from Orual’s descriptions.
- One of Orual’s most searching questions in her complaint against the gods is why they do not make things clear. Echoing the old priest from long-ago, she asks, “why must holy places be dark places?” (249). At this point in the book, the end of its first and longest part, how would you answer her question? Do you think the complaint that the gods are not clear is just? Or do you think that there is some deeper reason why holy things seem unclear? Since this is the end of part one, feel especially free to think back over the whole book in giving your answer.
- Here is a quote from William Maxwell’s book So Long, See you Tomorrow (New York: First Vintage International, 1996) that seems to describe what Orual has done. Explain what you think it means? Quote: What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
- Now describe a situation in your life that made you realize you had retold the past in order to be able to think of yourself in a certain way. If you can’t think of an example, think of a time when all the members of your family remembered an event in different ways. What is significant about that in reference to the previous quote?