“The Book of the Dead” by Edwidge Danticat
Guided Notes
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Answer each question in complete sentences.
Page 52
1. What happens to the narrator’s father after they reach the hotel?
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“Where are you and your daddy from, Ms. Binaime?” he asks.
I answer “Haiti” even though I was born and raised in East Flatbrush, Brooklyn, and have
never visited my parents’ birthplace. I do this because it is one more thing I have longed to have
in common with my parents.
2. How are the narrator’s actions different from what you might expect?
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Page 53
I also bring up the claw-shaped marks that run from his left ear down along his check to the
corner of his mouth – the only visible reminder of the time he spent at Fort Dimanche, the Portau-Prince prison ironically named after the Lord’s Day.
3. What is ironic about the name of the prison?
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4. In your own words, tell what the sculpture of the father looks like.
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“It’s like paradise here,” my father said when he saw the room. It had the same orange-andgreen wallpaper as in Salinas’s office, and the plush green carpet matched the walls. “Look
Annie,” he said, “it is like grass under our feet.” He was always searching for a glimpse of
paradise, my father.
5. How do the father and daughter react differently to the hotel décor?
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Pages 53-54
6. Why are the narrator and her father going to Florida?
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7. Name two reasons why this is such an important trip for the narrator?
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Page 54
By noon, four hours have gone by. And it was only then that I noticed that the car was still there
but the sculpture was gone.
8. Were you surprised that they sculpture is also missing? Explain your answer.
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Page 55
That night, my mother was returning home from a sewing class when he stumbled out of the
prison gates and collapsed into her arms, his face still bleeding from his latest beating. They
married and left for New York a year later.
9. What is ironic about this situation?
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“Tell me where you are,” she says. Two more hours and he’s not there, call me, then I come.
10. Compare and contrast the mother’s and daughter’s reactions to the disappearance.
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I think of the photo spread I saw in the Haitian Times of Gabriella Fonteneau and her parents in
their living room in Tampa. Her father was described as a lawyer, his daughter’s manager; her
mother a court stenographer. There was no hint in the photograph of what had once happened to
the father.
11. How is this information about Fonteneau’s father an example of situational irony?
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Page 56
“I’ll be there at twelve tomorrow,” I say. “My father is with me. We are making a little weekend
vacation of this.”
12. How is this statement different from what you might expect the narrator to say?
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When I was ten years old and my father had the chicken pox, I overheard him say to a friend on
the phone, “The doctor tells me that at my age chicken pox can kill a man.” This was the first
time I realized that my father could die.
13. Why do you think the narrator has this memory of this particular moment?
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Page 57
But now I am angry. I want to hit my father, beat the craziness out of his head.
14. Relate the narrator’s anger to situational irony. Remember that her father has information
that she does not.
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15. How does the reference to the ancient Egyptians and the Book of the Dead make the story
richer?
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Page 58
“And the nightmares, what are they?”
“Of what I, your father did to others.”
16. What is the narrator learning about her father?
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17. What are the father’s motives for getting rid of the sculpture?
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18. Why do you think the father never told his daughter the truth before?
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19. What is the effect of telling the truth now?
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20. Explain how the sculpture’s pose in which the narrator has depicted her father
unexpectedly shows him as he is now, rather than as he was in his prison days.
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21. Explain what you think prompted the father’s unexpected confession.
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He is sitting on the edge of his bed with his back to me, his head bowed, his face buried in his
lands. If I were sculpting him, I would make him a praying mantis, crouching motionless,
seeming to pray while waiting to strike.
22. How does this image contrast with how the father is actually feeling?
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Page 59
23.
Attribute
Occupation
Gabrielle
Annie (the narrator)
Number of children in
family
Standard of living
Father’s past
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Mr. Fonteneau asks when my father was last in Haiti.
“Twenty-six years,” my father replies.
“No going back for you?” asks Mrs. Fonteneau.
“I have not had the opportunity,” my father says
24. What’s ironic about the narrator’s Father’s response?
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Page 60
25. When it comes to the sculpture, how are Gabriella’s motives and the narrator’s motives
alike?
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I will make her another sculpture, one especially modeled on her father. But I don’t know when
I will be able to work on anything again. I have lost my subject, the father I loved as well as
pitied.
26. Explain what the narrator means in the quote above with regards to her and creating art.
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After all, we have the proverb, as my father would say: “Those who give the blows may try to
forget, but those who carry the scars must remember.”
27. Is the narrator saying that what happened in this story is a surprise – or no surprise at all?
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28. Once the sculpture is gone, there is no reason to go to the Fonteneau home. Why do you
think that the author includes this scene?
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29. Do you think that the narrator and her father should have still gone to the Fonteneau
home or should they have cancelled? Explain your opinion.
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