The Narrator Is a Person

Any book · Reading closely · Page 1 of 2

Name Date

DIRECTIONS: Book open beside you. Give a page number with every answer, and copy lines exactly.

Somebody is telling you this story. They choose what you get told, in what order — and what to leave out.

The book

Is the person telling this story in it, or standing outside it? Copy one line from anywhere in the book that settles it, and give the page.
Find one place where that choice shows. If the teller is in the story: something that happened while they were not in the room, and how the book got it to you anyway. If the teller is outside it: somewhere you are told a thing no person in the book knows.

Any book · Reading closely · Page 2 of 2

Find a sentence that crosses more time than it takes to read — that winter passed slowly, by the time we moved house. Copy it with the page, then name three things that must have happened inside it and are not in the book.
Find a line where you are told what somebody is thinking — not their face, not what they said aloud, the inside. Copy it, with the page.
How could the teller possibly know that? Somebody who is in the story cannot read minds. So: were they guessing from something they could see, were they told about it later, or has the book quietly forgotten who is talking? Decide, and say what decided it.
Find something you were told late that could have been told on page one. What was it, which page did it arrive on, and what had you believed until then?