Essay Questions

How is it appropriate to call this novel a true life ghost story?

The very opening lines of the book in the Prologue has a narrator who hasn’t even been introduced yet deciding the most important thing to share about the life this mysterious person has lived is that it led to the conclusion that ghosts do exist. The very next line explains that ghosts are “the ones who haunt us, the ones who have left us behind.” Any way you slice it, that is a definition of a ghost story that can be applied to any of the more traditional and conventional examples in entertainment history, from The Turn of the Screw to The Sixth Sense. It is true that by conventional measures, Orphan Train is not really a ghost story, but the self-delineated ghosts inhabiting the tale meet the standard set down in those opening lines as well as any traditional ghost story. It is an excellent example of the fluidity which must always be allowed for literary genres: even books which quite distinctly are intended to belong to some genres can nonetheless be fitted in through interpretation.

What does the novel have to say about the random quality of fate?

Two quotes are essential here. “My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection.” Then, a little later, “What up until this moment has felt like a random, disconnected series of unhappy events she now views as necessary steps in a journey.” The suggested lesson here is not particularly profound or complex or original, yet it remains so elusive to incorporate into our lives as to seem almost magical. The randomness of individual events can only possibly be viewed as such while they are happening and it is only with the perspective of time that the potential arrives to see connections between them which remained hidden in the moment of occurrence. The lesson is a reconcilable paradox: life is both random and fated toward an inevitable endpoint.

What is the significance of “portaging” to the theme of the novel?

Mr. Reed, Molly’s history teacher, has assigned a project on portaging among indigenous cultures. Portaging refers the necessary practice of loading all of one’s possessions into their canoe and actually physically carrying the vessel across land from one body of water to another. It is an active element of the migrant experience that literally fulfills the concept of taking one’s home with them as they travel from one place to another. This literal meaning is expanded into metaphor in the dual narratives of Molly and Vivian to convey the manner in which the ghosts of the past left behind always still remain with us through the journey of time and space that is human existence.