Chain of hearts english questions and answers

1. Which characters speak to us directly in the first-person? Why? The character that speaks to us directly is Sophie. This because the author has used words such as I, me and my and we can see through her perspective by being in her shoes and how she sees things. 2. The backcover blurb suggests that Sophie is the main character of the book. Do you agree? How important is Fran? Is it significant that hers is the only voice we hear directly for almost the first quarter of the book? I feel that Sophie is the main character, because we see things through her eyes, and we get an understanding of what is going through her head, whereas with Fran, we just get that third person view of her, and not actually experiencing what it is like living as Fran. Fran is quite an important character in this book, as Sophie spends a lot of time at Fran's house, as well as finding information about Fran that she would've not known. Yes, it is significant that we hear only Fran's voice in almost the first quarter of the book as we get a sense of what Fran was like when she was younger, who she hung out with and how she had acted when she was roughly the same age as Sophie. 3. Are the voices of Sophie and Fran different? Can you identify language features in Sophie’s narrative that you do not find in Fran’s? No, I don't feel that the voices of Sophie and Fran are different, because when you learn about what Fran had been like in her younger years throughout the different chapters of the book, you get a sense that a younger Fran could be a similar comparison to Sophie when she was 17 years old. Yes, I can identify language that you can't find in Fran's narrative but you can in Sophie's. Sophie's narrative includes some swearing and hatred towards people that you can't really find with Fran's. "The dragon, that b!tch commonly known as my mother, didn't come." (p.64) 4. We are almost three-quarters of the way through the book before we come to a chapter that is from Geraldine’s point of view, even though it is third-person narrative (pages 287-315). Does this chapter change our understanding of Geraldine? If so, how? I haven't read up to this chapter yet, so I am not sure. 5. The climax of the novel – Sophie’s return, Geraldine’s confrontation of Fran and the fire that destroys the house – is narrated in the third-person. What reasons might Maureen McCarthy have had for avoiding first-person at this point? Maureen McCarthy might have written the book in third person because she doesn't just want to just get one person's perspective on it, but wants to show how everyone would be reacting and feeling. Although with first person, you can hear what a person is thinking, you can't overly see what is happing in the scene if that character isn't present. You can show all the different emotions of all the characters in that area when narrated in third person, yet in first person, you can only see and hear so far. The narration of third person gives the reader the overall feeling in the scene, and create a better scene as you can tell if the house would be disintegrating, or if someone is dying or being hurt. 6. The final pages of the novel are first-person narrative. Unlike everything that has gone before, they are also written in the present tense. What is the effect of the use of present tense in this last scene, when Sophie goes to visit the Duong family? The effect of the use of present tense is that the chapter can become unexpected and it can put you into a situation and feel how the character is feeling at that present time, instead of just finding out what the character felt like. You can visualize how the person might be feeling at that moment, and how the mood might be in the room, as well as being able to catch every detail instead of just reading the important memories of what the characters had.