9. Does what happened to Thomas as a boy, as we learn through Mr. Hansen and his mother, justify or explain any of his actions and thoughts? Why or why not? What do the histories of Kev and Frank, the cop, do to complicate arguments of nature vs. nurture with respect to Thomas’s motives and sanity?
10. How do the captives attempt to challenge Thomas? Consider what strengths Kev, the congressman, and Sara employ when trying to lead him out toward the police waiting for him.
11. Why is Thomas so drawn to the congressman, in particular, and constantly seeking his approval? How does the congressman embody the religious, militaristic, and moral ideals Thomas claims to have?
12. Does Thomas’s personality reflect the mind-set of a zealot or extremist, and if so, how? What does he think his greater purpose is, as an individual and for the world/society?
13. Did you feel that Thomas’s plight became more personally, rather than politically, motivated at any point in the novel? If so, why and when? Consider the sequence of events after Frank’s capture, and what might be a fundamental common ground between, for example, the meaning of Don’s death for Thomas and his views on U.S. space exploration and foreign policy.
14. Do Thomas’s arguments about war, government spending, mental illness, and social welfare apply to events today? Did you ever find yourself agreeing with Thomas’s views, and how did you feel about that?
15. At the end of the novel, can you say definitively what Thomas really wanted from his captives, separately and together? What do his statements about motive—“I just want to get something I want” (this page) and “Do you realize what a strange race of people we are? No one else expects to get their way like we do. Do you know the madness that this unleashes upon the world—that we expect to have our way every time we get some idea in our head?” (this page)—suggest about his own sureness of why he’s doing what he’s doing?
16. What is it about Sara’s relationship to Thomas’s fantasy life, versus his real life, that allows him to be so open with her?
17. What do you make of Thomas’s understanding of a fulfilling life? In conjunction with the last line of the book, discuss his judgment of people who are “paragons of virtue and heroism but in the end … just want to stay alive [and] don’t want to be part of anything extraordinary” (this page). Does the way the novel ends suggest whether he’ll be successful in finding fulfillment?
18. What do you think is the meaning of the title of the book? How are these two questions raised throughout even as they’re never actually spoken? Are they answered, and if so how?
19. In what ways does dialogue stand in for narrative descriptions of setting and physical descriptions of the characters? What could you most easily visualize in your head, and what was more difficult?
20. In other books, Eggers has assumed the voice of a variety of characters real and fictional—from his friend Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the Sudanese Civil War in What Is the What to the adventurous boy Max in The Wild Things. How does this novel similarly explore, and expand upon, the range of voices and psychological traits from which Eggers can tell a story?
Suggested Reading
Julianna Baggott, The Pure Trilogy; Samuel Beckett, Endgame; Emma Donoghue, Room; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Joseph Heller, Catch-22; Peter Heller, The Dog Stars; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; David Mamet, American Buffalo; Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones; Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook; Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class.
Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
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