A study guide by Neal Lester

Themes
Symbols
Characterizations
Questions

Discussion Guide
Other reading guides

Mark Spragg, An Unfinished Life (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2004)

A Study Guide

Neal A. Lester, PhD
Department of English, Arizona State University
(March 2006)

Introduction

Mark Spragg’s An Unfinished Life is a riveting tale of forgiveness and redemption. With skillfully-drawn characters teetering at the edge of spiritual desperation because of choices they made or did not make, Spragg demonstrates the possibility of triumph through family, friendships, and self-acceptance. Spragg’s characters take on life beyond thee printed page as they reveal their vulnerabilities and fears, each on some level working to understand what is misunderstood and daring to speak what has been most often buried in silence and blame. Through patterns of symbols and metaphors, Spragg creates a story that entertains, challenges, and satisfies.

Themes     Back

Symbols     Back

Characterizations     Back

To what extent is this Griff’s story with other characters helping her to find her way toward selfhood and self-knowledge?

To what extent is this Einar’s story with other characters helping him to find his way toward selfhood and self-knowledge?

Discuss Griff’s relationship with Jean, Griff’s relationship with Mitch, Griff’s relationship with Einar.

Discuss the relationship between Einar and Jean. Why is it important that Einar catches Jean trying on his deceased wife Ella’s clothes late one night?

Discuss the relationship between Einar and the deceased Griffin?

What is significant about what Einar teaches Griff?

What does Griff teach Einar?

Discuss Jean’s relationships with men. What attracts her to abusive men?

How are women presented in the novel?

How are men presented in the novel?

Why is it important that Griff is able to wear her deceased father’s clothes?

Why has Einar kept clothing belonging to his deceased wife and son?

What role has whiskey played in Einar’s life, both past and present?

Does Spragg present Roy in terms that move beyond stereotype of the woman and child abuser?

What leads to Einar’s changed attitude toward Jean in the last part of the novel?

Discuss the relationship between Mitch and Einar. Do their moments of intimacy border on the homoerotic? Why has Spragg presented this possibility in males’ relationships with other males?

Discuss the significance between Mitch’s physical pain and Einar’s emotional and physical pain.

What is the importance of allowing the witness Roy’s attack on Griff near the novel’s end?

Why sis it important that Mitch is a black man? How does race figure into this story?

What is the significance of Mitch’s being maimed by a grizzly bear?

Discuss the relationship between Mitch and Jean. Is there any sense that a romance might have developed between these two characters?

What is the significance of Mitch and Einar’s shared war experience?

Discuss the significance and use of humor in the novel?

Title     Back

What is “an unfinished life”?

What distinguishes “a finished life” from “an unfinished life”?

What does it take to achieve “a finished life”?

Do you see any connections between Griff in this novel and Scout in Harper Lee’s 1962 novel To Kill a Mockingbird? Do you see similar themes in both novels?

Discuss the meaning and significance of the Mark Strand epigraph that opens the novel. How do these lines announce what the novel is about, what it means, and how it is put together?

Discussion Questions and Reading Guide     Back

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Mark Spragg’s An Unfinished Life, a moving and memorable story about a family’s search for forgiveness.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Jean Gilkyson works in a dry-cleaning shop and lives with her boyfriend, Roy, in his trailer in Iowa. Her ten-year-old daughter, Griff, has made her mother promise that the next time Roy beats up Jean they will leave him. So Griff is relieved when she and her mother finally drive away alone, determined to start a new life. When the car breaks down and the money runs out, Jean takes Griff to a place she’s never told her about before: her hometown in Wyoming. For years, Jean has been running away from the night when her young husband, Griffin, died in a car accident while she was driving. And for his part, Griffin’s father, Einar, has never forgiven Jean for the accident that took his son’s life. A widower, Einer is alone now except for his friend Mitch, and the two men, now old and without family ties, have become each other’s lifelines. When Jean and Griff arrive on his doorstep, Einar’s bitterness is heightened, but as he learns to love his granddaughter he is forced to come to terms with the destructive grief that he harbors. With grace and determination, and driven by the need to salvage her own young life, Griff unites these suffering adults in the hopes of creating two things she has never known—a real home and a stable family.

Immediately compelling and constantly surprising, rich in character, landscape, and compassion, An Unfinished Life shows a novelist of extraordinary talents in the fullness of his powers.

FOR DISCUSSION  
1. Near the opening of the novel Griff thinks, “Everybody’s mother is good at something. Her mother’s good at finding the same man, no matter where she lives” [p. 8]. How has Griff been affected by witnessing Jean’s abuse at the hands of her boyfriends?
2. What does Griff’s diary tell us about her feelings for her mother? What is good about their relationship? Which scenes indicate that Jean is a good mother? What does Griff admire about Jean?
3. How important are routines in the lives of Mitch and Einar? How is their humanity revealed in their daily activities? Does the novel suggest that it is routine that keeps them alive? How does the arrival of Jean and Griff alter these routines, and who benefits most from the changes?
4. How does the mood and tone of the novel change when the setting switches to Wyoming? What is the effect of Wyoming life and landscape on Griff?
5. As he massages Mitch’s shoulders, Einar “knows if he shuts his eyes he’d forget they weren’t the same man, that he wasn’t working the liniment into some scarred part of himself” [p. 21]. Why is the bond Einar feels with Mitch so profound?
6. How do details like Mitch’s dreams and his antler carvings illuminate aspects of his character? How is Mitch’s personality a counterpoint to Einar’s, particularly in their dealings with Griff?
7. When Starla, the sheriff’s receptionist, offers Jean a pistol, what stereotype of battered women does she reveal she believes in? How does Jean respond? What acts of bravery does Jean commit to create a better life for herself and Griff? How accurate is the novel’s depiction of domestic violence?
8. What is the significance of the bear in Mitch and Einar’s relationship? Why does Mitch want to set the bear free? Does the bear have a symbolic as well as literal presence in the novel? Why is the series of events involved in setting the bear free so important?
9. What does Jean’s return home reveal about her character? What do we learn of her relationship with Griffin? Why does she put her box of belongings back into the hole in the closet floor [p. 172]? What does it mean for her “to believe in chance as random as weather” [p. 172]?
10. The story proceeds at a quick pace, with some details about the characters’ pasts implied but not stated directly. For instance, how long ago was Mitch attacked by the bear? When did Einar start drinking heavily? What was Ella like, and how did she die? What other questions does the plot raise? Does it matter that these questions aren’t answered?
11. Which scenes and details best express the way Einar reacts to the realities of aging? How does he attempt to combat the aging of his body and for what reasons? Why has Spragg chosen an excerpt from Mark Strand’s poem “Not Dying” for the novel’s epigraph?
12. Describe the most admirable elements of Griff’s character. In which scenes does she seem indomitable, and in which scenes is she vulnerable and scared? In what way does Griff seem wiser than a typical ten-year-old, and how has she become that way?
13. How do power and control define Roy’s relationship with Jean? When is Roy most dangerous? If the novel can be said to have two dangerous antagonists, Roy and the bear, which—the human or the animal—is more threatening?
14. What characteristics did Einar value most in his son? In what ways does Griff remind him of Griffin? If Griffin’s life was “unfinished” [p. 43], as his father emphasized, does Griff represent a chance for its completion?
15. How does Jean’s guilt affect her life and relationships? How does Einar’s grief affect his life and relationships? What does the novel suggest about people’s need to hold on to their pain? How do Jean and Einar change over the
course of the novel?
16. Discuss the novel’s structure and narration. In what order is the story presented? From whose point(s) of view is the story told? With which character(s) does the reader become most intimately acquainted?
17. Describe Mark Spragg’s writing style. Is there a relationship between his style and the emotional impact of the story?

SUGGESTED READING 

William Faulkner, The Bear; Ivan Doig, English Creek; Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins; Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain; Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories; Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster; Kent Haruf, Plainsong; Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion; Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove and Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present (editor); Annie Proulx, Close Range; Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here; Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose; Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and The Fruit of Stone, a novel. Both were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into seven languages. He lives in Cody, Wyoming.



Courtesy Random House

Other Reading Guides      Back

1. Reading Group Guides.com http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/unfinished_life1.asp

2. Book Browse.com
http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm?book_number=1467