One very obvious game that a reader could play with this text is to focus first on the title of the text. The story about the Black Dog of Fate is told in a wild juxtaposition: Balakian is eagerly expecting something from his grandmother—dessert. She is in the kitchen preparing a delicious treat for him when she tells a story about her encountering a dead dog which she interpreted as a sign from fate. She says it isn't necessarily good or bad, per say, but rather, it is a sign for tremendous change.
That change is probably the family's relocation to America. So then, the analysis game of making sense of the memoir's title becomes more easily approached: Perhaps the grandmother's story is really about violence in their community and the sight of a dead dog which was omen enough for the family to leave before losing their lives in the systematic execution of over a million innocent Armenians. That racial genocide is unfathomable to a young boy like Balakian, but as he grows, he begins to see that it is the truth about his family's history.
This raises an interesting connection between him and his family. Although his grandmother does not like to re-afflict her trauma by discussing the genocide directly, he feels as though many of her stories share that Black Dog story's approach. By reading between the lines, he is able to deduce much of his family's history from partial data, and when he does this, he completes his duty to his family be recognizing his ancestry's history of abuse and mistreatment. He also learns that the Armenian Genocide is not just historical fact; to him it is as close as family.
