I didn't know if I would like this story when I first started reading. The title makes it seem like the adventures of a talking dog, but the story is mostly about the family. It seems like an ordinary family, but a lot happens to them in the story. The death of the father kind of just passes along. There isn't much description. This seems to be a reflection of what the family is like, distant from one another. They deal with things on their own. Jimmy says at the end of the story that the older sister "had powers," and the younger sister disagrees. Life is ordinary for most people, and it ends so abruptly like the father and the daughter in this story. Maybe Jimmy sees something remarkable about that ordinariness. He was always trying to be extraordinary himself, and he doesn't amount to much by the end of the story. Melanie asked if it would be better from Jimmy's perspective, and I think it would be interesting to see the family from the outside looking in.
In the last line of the story it says that Jimmy would love the older sister more for pretending to talk to a dog. The dog represents dead people in the story, so maybe he means that by talking to dogs she was trying to make some sense of death. Everyone else in the story seems to move along without thinking much about what happens. The younger sister says that Jimmy would always "prefer [the older sister's] smoky opacity to" her "transparent face" (pg. 504). He sees some mystery in the older sister, and maybe he connects this mysteriousness with the mystery about life and death. Even if she was only pretending to talk to dogs, he would forgive her because she was trying to find some meaning.
Why does the author include the detail about the mother's views on race? Does this tie into the theme of the story?
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