HW due Wednesday

Montana 1948 pgs 72-82 (20pts)
1. David's grandfather, on the next page, lets slip that his son Frank has "always been partial to red meat." He is speaking about Indian women, of course, but the metaphor he chooses is telling. What does it show about him? How does he seem to feel about his son's improprieties?
2. The novel then moves to flashback, returning us to a distant memory of Frank's bachelor party. Again, David relays an overheard conversation. Look to page 75--here, his father delivers a drunken speech about the "Hayden boys," describing them as a kind of fraternity of lawlessness and macho bravado. "We are the law!" he says. Then he vomits. Explain the connection between this scene and the statement on page 21 that David's father is a man "who tried to turn two ways at once" (21).
3. On page 76 we meet David's grandmother. How is she different from the other women in the novel, especially David's own mother? What is this meant to show?
4. On page 77, David confesses his erotic attraction for his Aunt Gloria, and describes a scene when, bedridden, she tended to him. He even pretends to be asleep, in order that he may enjoy her closeness to him: "as she bent down to feel my forehead," David confesses, "I could smell her perfume." Does this arrangement--an erotic attraction in the midst of medical care--remind you of anything else in the novel?
5. Subsequently, David overhears a whispered conversation between his aunt and his uncle, then the squeaking of their bedsprings. What's going on here? Does this scene change, if briefly, or sense of Uncle Frank the Indian molester?
6. On page 79-80, David is given an automatic pistol by his grandfather and told to go shoot coyotes. David says of handguns: "They were something not serious, not for bringing down game but for shooting as an activity in and of itself...." How is this gun different from the guns David's father has given him and trained him to use? Is it significant that it comes from his grandfather? Does it have a symbolic meaning?
7. What is the double meaning of the two paragraphs on page 80 that begin: "I shot up the entire box of bullets." (Consider that in the scene immediately preceding, David has experienced powerful erotic sensations at his aunt's perfume--and disgust as well.)
8. Of the magpie that he shoots, David says on page 81, "I hadn't even known it but I needed to kill something." What is he struggling with? Why must his anger manifest itself in violence?
9. Continue your interpretation on page 82, with the paragraph that begins "I felt the way I did when I woke from an especially disturbing and powerful dream....." Pay particular attention to the lines: "I realized that these strange, unthought-of connections--sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation--are there, there, deep in even a good heart's chambers."