Summer Reading Program

Reader's Guide - Honky by Dalton Conley

Chapter Seven: “The Hawk” (pages 75-89)

Content Questions:

1. What does his friends’ habit of stopping at Ray’s for a slice of pizza make Conley keenly aware of?
2. When Conley says that “even the money used” to buy food was different, what does he mean? (79).
3. Why did Conley go out to the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island? 
4. Why doesn’t Conley want to take Michael home with him?

Discussion Questions & Journal Ideas:

1. When Conley says that the bus rides served as his “transitional period” every day (76), what does he mean?  What face does he have to take off and which one must he then “put on”? (76).
2. Conley writes, “I felt humbly thankful for the opportunities I was enjoying at P.S. 41 yet simultaneously was developing a sense of superiority over my old neighbors.  This quiet feeling of snobbery was a way of displacing my sense of class inadequacy onto people who I now saw as even lower down on the ladder than I was” (76).  Explain what Conley is talking about here.  Can he justify his feelings here, or not?  Why or why not?  Does he have a choice?
3. How does something as seemingly simple as the color of food highlight the differences between Greenwich Village and his own neighborhood?
4. Compare and contrast the bookshelves and the attitudes towards reading in Conley’s home and Michael’s home.  What do these differences say about the two homes, the two boys, the two families?
5. What further differences between his life and Michael’s life are highlighted by the trip to the “No Nukes” rally on Long Island?  Is Conley making any subtle (or not so subtle) value judgments here? 
6. Why does Conley title this chapter “The Hawk,” do you think?
7. What does Conley mean when he writes that Michael had “outdone” him in his own neighborhood (90)?

 

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