Discuss how each of the characters in the novel are shaped by their past?Ĥ. When mentioning his research, Oliver proposes that the personal histories of whales - "who the whale is, where he has been sighted, with whom he has been sighted - tell us something about why he sings the way he does" (9). Which relationships in the novel are founded on spoken connections and which are based on something other than language? How are these relationships different? How do these different relationships affect the characters?ģ. So much of the novel is about voice and people finding themselves through their voices - Jane is a speech therapist, Oliver tracks whale songs, Joley's words guide Jane and Rebecca across the country. How does this affect the reading experience?Ģ. How did the alternating voices enhance or detract from the reading experience for you? Did you find that the characters' differing accounts of the events of the novel added to the dramatic tension, and how so? Similarly, Rebecca is the only character to narrate the novel's events backwards chronologically. It is only after a tragic accident that the Jones family can finally return home, together again but forever changed.ġ. Once Oliver arrives at the orchard to reclaim his family, Jane must finally decide whether or not to abandon her newfound love in order to return to California and fulfill her responsibilities to her husband and her daughter.
When Rebecca witnesses her mother and Sam's burgeoning love affair, she finds solace in Hadley, who offers her the support and nurturing she has so often yearned for from her own parents.
Sam, a small-town apple farmer, pushes Jane to unveil the secrets of her past, finally enabling her to open her heart in the present.
When Jane and Rebecca arrive at a Massachusetts apple orchard, they each meet new people who will challenge them and force them to reconsider their life choices. Traversing their way across the United States, following the directional clues provided to them by Jane's brother Joley, Jane and Rebecca inch their way toward Massachusetts while Oliver, an expert whale tracker, follows close behind his wife and daughter. When an explosive argument with her husband prompts Jane and her daughter Rebecca to abruptly leave their California home, the two women head east armed with little other than a few dollars, the clothes on their backs, and their love for one another. Jodi Picoult's richly literary novel Songs of the Humpback Whale tells the story of a fragile family and one woman's voyage towards self-discovery.
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