The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (98 page)

8. How does Tracy Bacon alter the course of Sammy’s life and change Sammy’s perception of himself? Tracy’s very name seems to symbolize
Sammy’s departure from his roots: “Bacon” is a pork product, and therefore nonkosher. When Sammy leads Tracy home to meet his mother, he thinks of himself as having “the world largest piece of trayf in tow” (
this page
); “trayf” even echoes “Tracy.” Do you think he would have discovered his sexuality and rejected his previous constraints without the presence of a radically different “other” (as Tracy is, in looks, religion, temperament)?

9. What do you think of the significance of futuristic, modern, forward-looking technology and invention in the book? Sammy, for instance, seems captive to the magic of technology: Even as a child, he had a “Zharkov’s laboratory on the kitchen table,” where he invented “tandem bottle openers” and “heatless clothes irons” (
this page
), and later he falls in love with the World’s Fair and its marvels because the fair offers “the promise of a better world to come” (
this page
). What are other instances in
Kavalier & Clay
of Sammy’s love of the future, and of futuristic promises? How does this contrast with Joe’s occasional tendency to live in the past?

10. Around the time that Joe and Sammy create their
All Doll
comic book, featuring Luna Moth, Rosa notices that Joe’s “heart had gone out of the mayhem” (
this page
) of fighting Nazis via the Escapist. His art begins blossoming in a new way as he forgets his guilt. And thus, “just as his mother had begged him (though he did not know it), Joe had turned his thoughts from Prague, his family, the war” (
this page
). What do you think occasions Joe’s transfer of attention and energy from Europe and the war to America and his pure art? What is it that has changed his thinking?

11. There are many strange transformations, real and imagined, that occur throughout
Kavalier & Clay
. Shannenhouse transforms the skins of the sled dogs into a casing for his airplane (
this page
); Joe imagines Thomas’s transformation “into an American boy” (
this page
); and there is the original transformation, of dirt from the River Moldau into a golem, centuries before the story begins. How do these transformations relate to the themes of magic, escape, and art in the book? Are the
characters’ various pursuits—magic tricks (Joe), storytelling and invention (Sammy), art (Joe and Rosa)—all a kind of alchemical transformation of one thing into another?

12. When Joe awakens in Antarctica to find that a gas leak has killed most of his colleagues and their dogs, he runs outside and experiences a “strange vision” just before he passes out. His old magic teacher, Bernard Kornblum appears, and speaks:
“ ‘Escapistry,’
he said, with his usual scorn” (
this page
). What do you think “escapistry” means at this moment? Joe repeatedly evades death in
Kavalier & Clay
: his near-drowning in the River Moldau and the Trevi Fountain, the gas leak, his showdown with the German scientist, his subsequent solo trek across the Antarctic ice. Are these successful escapes (from death) or unsuccessful escapes (in that Joe actually wants to escape from
life
)? Or could they be both?

13. Are all the characters in
Kavalier & Clay
trying, to some extent, to escape from something? We know right away that Joe has to flee Prague, and that Sammy “dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape” (
this page
). But what about Rosa? Or colleagues like Anapol and Deasey? Or, years later, Tommy? Do you think everyone in the novel is engaged in some attempt at “escapistry”?

14. Joe’s old magic teacher, Bernard Kornblum, says that “only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks” (
this page
). He is referring to Houdini getting help from his wife, Bess, in a particularly difficult escape, but how can this idea, of love as the mightiest key, be applied throughout
Kavalier & Clay
? We’re told that for Joe, “the love of a boy had sprung him, and drawn him at last, blinking, before the footlights” (
this page
). Are there other instances in the novel of love finally setting characters free? How does this wisdom from Kornblum, realized at the end of the story, change the way we might perceive earlier, failed attempts at escape?