Essay Questions

What is the event which stimulates the decision by the narrator’s mother to move the family from Santa Monica to Hillside?

The narrator’s sister, Christina, returns home despondent from a YMCA day camp. When pressed as to what made her so unhappy, she confesses to being disconsolate as a result of feeling left out of the sense of good fellowship when campers started cheering “Yeah, white camp!” on the way home from a trip to the Museum of National History. The narrator intervenes to console her by explaining this was a misunderstanding and that the campers were really just cheering “Yeah, Y camp” as they always do and that they were no trying to isolate her at all. This leads their mother to ask if they would rather go to an all-black camp to which they respond with a vociferous no, explaining “Because they’re different from us.” This is apparently the last and final of a long line of straws in which her children have had their black identity challenged by the predominantly white cultural influences in Santa Monica.

Why doesn’t Gunnar wind up attending Harvard?

Gunnar is recruited by many of the top universities and colleges in the country, including representatives from the Ivy League. His mother is particularly keen on his going to an Ivy League school, characterizing the recruiter from Harvard as intellectual who sounds like a decent man. In fact, the only decent thing about the entire meeting is the brutality of his honesty in being absolutely indecent. Despite being a black man himself, he is openly condescending toward the entire population of Hillside where Gunnar lives. He is openly materialistic, married to a white trophy wife whose sexual flirtation with the young student goes about unremarked upon, and, most notably, is awestruck by his own system-cheating brilliance in pretending to help poor people who are “beyond help” receive assistance of people of his “illustrious ilk” in order to “reinforce the different between them and us.”

How many classes does Gunnar wind up attending once he chooses to enroll in Boston University?

Gunnar’s entire career as a student at Boston University consists of one class, Creative Writing 104, taught by Professor Oscar Edelstein. The class is a poetry workshop. And by one class, that is meant quite literally: he attends just one hour-long class and never returns. Classmates include Peyote Chandler, daughter of the Ambassador to Pakistan who burns her face badly while trying to replicate the suicide of her role model, Sylvia Plath, but forgetting to actually turn the pilot light out before shoving her head into the oven. This attempt was due to a breakup with a boyfriend named Skip Pettibone Helmsford. Another classroom is Chadwick Osterdorf, III. Like Peyote, Chadwick also has a role model, in this case French poet Arthur Rimbaud, whom he describes as the “only true poet ever to walk the earth.”

Both Peyote and Chadwick are quick to bury rather than praise their gods of verse the minute they learn that the highly opinionated young black man tossing derisive comments their way is the famous Gunnar Kaufman. Peyote has even compiled a photographic album titled Ghettotopia: An Anthropological Rending of the Ghetto through the Street Poems of an Unknown Street Poet Named Gunnar Kaufman. His reaction is to remove himself permanently from academia, but classmates and instructor are successful in urging him to publish the collection that will make him world-famous.