Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book: How Questions and boost our understanding and help produce a meaningful analysis!
How Nobody Came to the Graveyard
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand, he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it, he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly coloured bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.
He flexed his fingers. The man Jack was, above all things, a professional, or so he told himself, and he would not allow himself to smile until the job was completed.
1) What effects are created by the opening sentence and what type of text do you expect? Does the sentence seem surreal? Why?
2) Consider why the writer uses the (second person) pronoun, ‘you’ in the second paragraph. Think about the effects on the reader.
3) How is the knife described to the reader and what is the effect of the knife’s animation do you feel? Is there any irony in the independent ‘life’ of the knife?
4) Is the outside, ‘nighttime’ world friend or foe? How do you arrive at this conclusion?
5) Why do we wait until paragraph five before we encounter the name of the killer? What is the effect in declaring him a ‘man’ and why is there such a delay?
6) Jack’s actions are very deliberate and described in methodical, even in practical detail. Why?
7) What do you feel about the connotations of the word, ‘hunt’? And how are the deaths of the family members presented? Why?
8) Does the phrase, ‘take care of’ seem ironic in the circumstances? What is the purpose of this rather oblique phrase?
9) What is the effect of the word ‘smile’ is the final paragraph? Is the noun, ‘job’ heartless?
10) Overall, how is ‘Jack’ characterised by the writer?
