The Great Unexpected

“Even after I’d heard the tale many times, always the same, I still worried that the poor man might reach in and pull out a snapping turtle or an alligator or something equally unpleasant and unexpected.”

This line introduces Naomi’s dread of unexpected events, even when there is no good reason to anticipate the occurrence of something horrible. She refers to the story, and especially the donkey, throughout the text so that it functions similarly to an allusion, acting as a shorthand way to describe her anxious feelings when other upsetting events occur.

“Joe, my guardian and a man of few words, once said about Lizzie, ‘That girl could talk the ears off a cornfield.’”

This line embodies Joe’s sense of humor and helps to illuminate his character, who doesn’t talk or appear in the text often. Naomi highlights his humor by sharing his use of a pun to describe Lizzie’s garrulousness. Lizzie is so talkative, he says, that she could talk the ears off a cornfield, which would have thousands and thousands of ears of corn growing in it. The pun plays on the two meanings of the word “ear”—the first being what we use to listen and the second being an “ear” of corn. It’s a corny joke, but it typifies Joe.

“I suppose the only thing I wanted beyond [someone to care for and feed me] was that it wouldn’t be my fault. What ‘it’ was, I couldn’t say. But ‘it’ was usually bad and always unexpected.”

This line depicts how significantly Naomi’s fear of the unexpected pervades her consciousness, even as a very young child. Though she cannot even name whatever “it” is that she fears, the line shows how much she has subconsciously internalized a sense of responsibility for things that go wrong, like the blood clot that developed during her mother’s pregnancy and the dog attack that resulted in her father’s death.