The Life Before Her Eyes (27 page)

9. What significance do physical beauty, sensuality, and "the blatant sexuality" of life have for the teenaged Diana and for the adult Diana? What roles do beauty and sexuality play in the lives of the novel's characters and in all our lives? How successful is Kasischke in conveying the young woman's and older woman's sexual awareness and experience?

10. How might we explain the sequence of increasingly mysterious and scary events that transform the adult Diana's dream-perfect life—for example, the howl and laughter she hears on the radio after her meeting with Sister Beatrice, and Timmy's reappearance? What might be the sources and significance of these and similar experiences? To what extent did each event prompt you to modify your view of Diana?

11. What instances are there of the adult Diana's noticing the absence of something from her world and at that precise moment observing her world fill up again with that something?
To what extent might these instances affirm the power of thought and imagination to shape the world in which we live? To what extent might their significance relate to some other power?

12. What is the significance, near the novel's end, of the wolf that the adult Diana, we are told, had seen before—"the blue eyes, the howling in the next room"? How might we interpret the clause that follows Diana's recognition of the wolf—"but that was something else, that was before he became this, before he began this life"? Why might the moment outside the wolf cage, as Diana faces the wolf, be "the moment she'd been born for," "the moment in which she gave up
herself..."
?

13. One reviewer has written of "the central questions of the novel: What is the difference, if any, between perception and reality? Is an imagined future as real as an actual one"? How does Kasischke explore these questions, and what conclusions does she arrive at? After completing
The Life before Her Eyes,
how would you answer these two questions?

14. How credible is it that the story of Diana's adult life occurs instantaneously, as Michael Patrick shoots her in the left temporal lobe of her brain, "the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is"? What details in the preceding narrative link the "what would have been" with what has been and what is? What situations might give rise to an instantaneous view of the possible versions of one's life? What alternative versions of Diana's future life might we—and she—envision?

Written by Hal Hager & Associates, Somerville, New Jersey