Shane Read-Along: Chapter 14

And Bob follows Shane to town.  He has to, from a storytelling standpoint, since Bob's our narrator, and it would be absolutely terrible not to see the culmination of this story.  But I love what it says about Bob too, about his devotion to Shane.  He can't stand for Shane to go up against them truly alone.  Even though he can't help, and he could end up a hindrance, he has to be there with him.  And so we, through Bob, get to see Shane's magnificent, doomed stand against the forces of evil in this valley.

It's a good fight, don't you think?  He faces Wilson down square and even gives him a chance to live, though Wilson doesn't take it.  And he gets that sidewinding Fletcher too.

Unfortunately, he doesn't escape unscathed himself.  Sob.


Favorite Lines:

I went softly down the steps and into the freedom of the night (p. 104).

He was tall and terrible there in the road, looming up gigantic in the mystic half-light.  He was the man I saw that first day, a stranger, dark and forbidding, forging his lone way out of an unknown past in the utter loneliness of his own immovable and instinctive defiance.  He was the symbol of all the dim, formless imaginings of danger and terror in the untested realm of human potentialities beyond my understanding.  The impact of the menace that marked him was like a physical blow (p. 105).

There was the Shane of the adventures I had dreamed for him, cool and competent, facing that room full of men in the simple solitude of his own invincible completeness (p. 108).

He gazed down at me and into me and he knew.  He knew what goes on in a boy's mind and what can help him stay clean inside through the muddled, dirtied years of growing up (p. 112).

A cloud passed over the moon and he merged into the general shadow and I could not see him and the cloud passed on and the road was a plain thin ribbbon to the horizon and he was gone (p. 114).

Possible Discussion Questions:

Shane says, "A man is what he is, Bob, and there's no breaking the mold" (p. 113).  Do you agree?  Can people change?

He also says, "There's no going back from a killing, Bob.  Right or wrong, the brand sticks and there's no going back" (p. 113).  We've seen that even though Shane arrived in a community where he was a complete stranger, people knew what sort of man he is, that he has killed and could kill again.  Do you think Shane wanted people to know this about him, or could he have hidden it?  I'm not phrasing this quite right -- do you think that he could have hidden it and didn't want to, or was it going to be obvious no matter how he dressed and behaved?