12 Analytical Essay Prompts for Life, and Death, and Giants

These prompts are designed to guide analytical essays on Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants. Each prompt is rooted in the novel’s specific characters, events, and thematic tensions. Use the provided evidence leads to locate scenes and chapters for close reading.

1. The Transformation of Hannah Fisher

How does Hannah Fisher’s relationship with secrecy and silence evolve from her youth to her final act of leaving the Amish community?

Why this prompt matters: Hannah’s narrative arc bridges the novel’s central tensions between faith, hidden knowledge, and personal agency. Her journey is the emotional spine of the story.

Sample thesis direction: Hannah initially uses secrecy to preserve her inner world, but after her father’s death and the revelation of his abuse, she redefines silence as complicity and embraces truth even when it fractures her Amish identity.

Evidence leads:

Her secret reading of Emily Dickinson as a young woman (Chapter 1, “Hannah Fisher”)
The clandestine lullabies she sings across the river to the shunned Rachel (Chapter 3, “Hannah Fisher”)
Her hidden trip to watch Gabriel play baseball, violating Josiah’s wishes (Chapter 6, “Hannah Fisher”)
Her decision to show Meg their father’s confessional letter (Chapter 32, “Hannah Fisher”)
Leaving Josiah’s home to live with Thomas Kennedy (Chapter 32, “Hannah Fisher”)

2. The Causal Chain of Rachel’s Pregnancy

Trace the novel’s chain of cause and effect from Rachel Fisher’s Rumspringa pregnancy to the global fame and physical destruction of Gabriel. What does this chain suggest about the role of hidden sin and public spectacle?

Why this prompt matters: The novel’s structure hinges on Rachel’s secret. Unpacking this causal web reveals how private decisions ripple outward into communal and international consequences.

Sample thesis direction: Rachel’s concealed trauma—her father’s incestuous abuse—initiates a sequence in which silence, shame, and the desire for anonymity paradoxically generate the very spectacle that destroys the community’s obscurity and Gabriel’s body.

Evidence leads:

Rachel’s refusal to name the father, leading to streng meidung (Chapter 3, “Hannah Fisher”)
The town’s speculation about Gabriel’s paternity, dismissing Zack Foster and Oliver Edwards (Chapter 7, “Billy Walton”)
Gabriel’s birth as a veterinary event that begins Lakota’s loss of invisibility (Prologue)
Absalom Yoder’s suicide letter confessing he fathered Rachel’s children (Chapter 30, “Hannah Fisher”)
The media frenzy and pornographic offer that exploit Gabriel’s body (Chapter 24, “Billy Walton”)

3. Thomas Kennedy and Surrogate Fatherhood

How does Thomas Kennedy’s role as a surrogate father to Gabriel challenge or reinforce the novel’s message about biological versus chosen family?

Why this prompt matters: Thomas is the only constant parental figure in Gabriel’s life. Comparing his devotion to the failures of biological fathers illuminates the novel’s definition of legacy.

Sample thesis direction: Although Thomas doubts his own significance and mourns his childless state, his steadfast presence proves that fatherhood is a series of deliberate acts of care, not a function of blood, and his bond with Gabriel ultimately redeems his unremarkable life.

Evidence leads:

Thomas delivering Gabriel with livestock cables and later bringing fish dinners (Prologue; Chapter 6, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The Milwaukee trip to visit the aging Dorothy, where Thomas observes Gabriel’s empathy (Chapter 10, “Thomas Kennedy”)
Thomas shielding Gabriel from Jasper’s suicide and comforting him (Chapter 10, “Thomas Kennedy”)
His advice on love and intimacy when Gabriel confides about Isabella (Chapter 19, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The final decision to sell his house to Bella and drive west, carrying what Hannah left him (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)

4. Innocence and Commodification: T-Ball Versus Wrestling

Contrast the T-ball episode in Chapter 7 with the professional wrestling match in Chapter 27. How do these two spectacles mark the loss of Gabriel’s innocence?

Why this prompt matters: The novel frames Gabriel’s physical gifts as at once miraculous and exploitable. These two scenes bookend his public life, revealing how the community’s gaze shifts from wonder to consumption.

Sample thesis direction: In T-ball, Gabriel’s strength is a source of communal delight and local legend; in wrestling, it becomes a product packaged as “Anakim, the Amish Giant,” and the shift from pastoral play to staged violence reflects the broader theme of anonymity versus spectacle.

Evidence leads:

Gabriel hitting .820 with 32 home runs, using a tiny T-ball bat (Chapter 7, “Billy Walton”)
Parents pulling their children after Gabriel injures Johnny Polkowski (Chapter 9, “Billy Walton”)
The wrestling entrance with a live goat that moves Hannah to tears (Chapter 27, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The masked man attacking with a goat fleece, and the Sheik using Gabriel’s prosthetic leg as a weapon (Chapter 27, “Thomas Kennedy”)
Hannah’s refusal to watch wrestling videos because she does not want to “share in it” (Chapter 23, “Hannah Fisher”)

5. Anonymity as Faith: Lakota’s Vanishing Ideal

Lakota’s residents “treasure anonymity and the freedom to fail.” How does Gabriel’s existence systematically dismantle this ideal, and what does the town sacrifice in exchange for his fame?

Why this prompt matters: The prologue frames the entire novel as a story about lost obscurity. Tracing this loss through the town’s collective response exposes a central thematic conflict.

Sample thesis direction: The town’s cherished invisibility is eroded not only by Gabriel’s physical extremity but by the residents’ own complicity—Billy’s boosterism, Trey’s coaching ambition, and the citizen blockade that weaponizes privacy as a form of vigilante spectacle.

Evidence leads:

The prologue’s promise that Gabriel’s birth will strip Lakota of its obscurity (Prologue)
The photocopied birth certificate Billy uses to quiet rival coaches (Chapter 9, “Billy Walton”)
The Sports Illustrated cover, ESPN coverage, and college recruitment that overwhelm the Fisher farm (Chapter 18, “Trey Beathard”)
The citizen roadblock that smashes paparazzi equipment and detains photographers (Chapter 37, “Billy Walton”)
The town’s refusal to erect a sign celebrating Gabriel after he leaves (Chapter 19, “Thomas Kennedy”)

6. Emily Dickinson as Hannah’s Hidden Oracle

How does Emily Dickinson’s poetry function as a secret space of intellectual and emotional freedom for Hannah Fisher?

Why this prompt matters: The epigraph and Hannah’s repeated encounters with Dickinson create a textual spine of dissent. Dickinson offers a language for doubt that Hannah cannot voice in Amish life.

Sample thesis direction: Dickinson’s poems, hidden in her mother’s book, become a counter-scripture for Hannah, enabling her to question patriarchal authority, process grief, and ultimately reconcile with a God who permits suffering and a “marauding Hand.”

Evidence leads:

Hannah discovering her mother’s hidden Dickinson book and reading in secret (Chapter 3, “Hannah Fisher”)
The epigraph’s reduction of “Life, and Death, and Giants” to “Minor—Apparatus—Hopper of the Mill—” (Chapter 1, Epigraph)
Reading Dickinson after Gabriel’s amputation and finding a verse about Heaven’s “marauding Hand” (Chapter 21, “Hannah Fisher”)
Thomas gifting Hannah his mother’s scholarly book on Dickinson (Chapter 25, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The poems left for Thomas as part of their farewell, along with a mother-of-pearl comb (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)

7. Multiple Narrators and the Inaccessible Gabriel

How does the novel’s multi-narrator structure—Hannah, Thomas, Billy, Trey—construct Gabriel Fisher as a character who remains fundamentally unknowable even to those who love him most?

Why this prompt matters: Gabriel never narrates. The reader accesses him only through others’ perspectives, which emphasizes his symbolic weight and the loneliness of gigantism.

Sample thesis direction: The rotating first-person testimonies reveal that each narrator projects his or her own longings onto Gabriel—Hannah’s maternal grief, Thomas’s paternal hope, Billy’s lost athletic dreams, Trey’s redemption narrative—so that Gabriel becomes a collective artifact rather than a fully realized self, until his death grants him a posthumous voice through story and miracle.

Evidence leads:

Billy Walton comparing Gabriel to a Michelangelo and lamenting he has no family at the championship game (Chapter 16, “Billy Walton”)
Thomas’s fatherly emails contrasting with Gabriel’s press-conference persona (Chapter 19, “Thomas Kennedy”)
Trey Beathard’s handwritten letter warning about fame’s temptations, which Gabriel never answers on the page (Chapter 26, “Trey Beathard”)
Hannah treasuring Gabriel’s early happiness and fearing his Rumspringa departure (Chapter 14, “Hannah Fisher”)
Gabriel on his deathbed, finally telling his own stories about the Cluny tapestries (Chapter 35, “Hannah Fisher”)

8. Foreshadowing the Fall: The Body That Breaks

Identify the physical and narrative details that foreshadow Gabriel’s catastrophic football injury. What do these details suggest about the novel’s view of exceptional bodies?

Why this prompt matters: Gabriel’s gigantism is presented as both miracle and liability. The injury is not a surprise but a carefully built inevitability, and the foreshadowing encodes the novel’s tension between gift and doom.

Sample thesis direction: From the epigraph’s metaphor of a beetle at a candle to the repeated references to Gabriel’s untrainable mass, the novel seeds the idea that a body so far beyond human scale cannot survive the machinery of organized sport; the injury is the moment spectacle consumes the body that generated it.

Evidence leads:

The epigraph’s imagery of mechanized, impersonal forces—“Hopper of the Mill,” “Beetle at the Candle” (Chapter 1)
Gabriel weighing four hundred pounds in pads and never training conventionally (Chapter 15, “Trey Beathard”)
Gabriel’s roommate saying, “Fish, don’t be stupid! ... We’re not out here bird-watching!” before a game where Gabriel misses a falcon encounter (Chapter 19, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The Badgers’ offensive line coach marveling at Gabriel’s 670-pound bench press and 900-pound squat (Chapter 19, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The knee hyperextension, brace shatter, and torn popliteal artery during the Ohio State game (Chapter 20, “Billy Walton”)

9. The Ending’s Departures and Arrivals

In the final chapter, Thomas Kennedy sells his house and drives west. Is this ending optimistic, elegiac, or both? Defend your interpretation through the novel’s treatment of grief and legacy.

Why this prompt matters: The final pages resist closure, leaving Thomas in motion. The chapter condenses the novel’s attitude toward loss and the possibility of beginning again at any age.

Sample thesis direction: Thomas’s westward departure is neither escape nor triumph but a quiet acknowledgment that loving Hannah and Gabriel has reshaped him into a man capable of choosing his own life, even at seventy-one, and that legacy resides in the small artifacts—a comb, a book of poems—that outlast the bodies they touched.

Evidence leads:

Thomas treasuring Hannah’s mother-of-pearl comb and the Dickinson volume she left (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)
His admission to Trey that he cannot stay because longing has become resolution (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)
Scattering his mother’s ashes from a borrowed kayak on Lake Michigan (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The sale of his house to Bella, Gabriel’s widow, for below asking price (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The final image of hauling a trailer toward a rustic cabin on the Missouri River, feeling his life is just beginning (Chapter 43, “Thomas Kennedy”)

10. Fireflies and the Language of Miracle

Analyze the firefly motif as it appears in Hannah’s lullaby memory and Gabriel’s death scene. How do fireflies operate as a symbol of the novel’s negotiation between natural wonder and divine intervention?

Why this prompt matters: The climactic death scene pulses with supernatural imagery that the novel refuses to label definitively as miracle or coincidence. Fireflies bridge the Amish world of parables and the English world of skepticism.

Sample thesis direction: The fireflies that gather at Gabriel’s death—like the fireflies of Hannah’s childhood—represent a natural phenomenon imbued with spiritual meaning; the novel leaves the interpretation open, honoring both Hannah’s Amish faith and Thomas’s scientific temperament, and suggesting that the divine, if it exists, operates through the physical world rather than against it.

Evidence leads:

Hannah’s story of “Schloof, Bobbeli, Schloof” and the firefly memory on the night Jasper dies (Chapter 11, “Hannah Fisher”)
Gabriel’s deathbed humming, which precipitates birds, animals, insects, and tens of thousands of fireflies forming a pillar of light (Chapter 40, “Hannah Fisher”)
Hannah sensing Gabriel’s soul depart as the fireflies ascend (Chapter 40, “Hannah Fisher”)
Thomas collecting feathers from the scene to lay on Gabriel’s body (Chapter 40, “Hannah Fisher”)
The closing image of Hannah, Bella, and Raphael catching fireflies as a ritual of continuity (Chapter 42, “Hannah Fisher”)

11. Josiah and the Cost of Silence

Examine Josiah Fisher’s role in the narrative. Is he a tragic figure trapped by patriarchal Amish codes, or does his silence make him complicit in generational harm?

Why this prompt matters: Josiah is often in the background, yet his actions—joining Rachel’s shunning, hiding Gabriel’s baseball schedule, paying off pranksters—shape the family’s possibilities. Understanding him complicates the novel’s critique of Amish patriarchy.

Sample thesis direction: Josiah’s silence is a survival strategy born of a rigid faith, but his knowledge of Absalom’s abuse and his failure to protect Rachel or speak the truth to Hannah ultimately make him a participant in the “bedrock of lies” that Hannah must escape; his late-care gentleness with Gabriel’s deathbed arrangements does not expiate but does humanize him.

Evidence leads:

Josiah’s declaration that the unbaptized Jasper cannot be saved and that Gabriel may be evil (Chapters 3 and 11)
His willingness to allow Hannah’s secret baseball outing but his refusal to share the schedule (Chapter 8, “Hannah Fisher”)
His payment to pranksters who disrupted the farm during Gabriel’s fame (Chapter 17, “Hannah Fisher”)
Hannah’s confrontation, where Josiah’s “damning silence” confirms his complicity (Chapter 32, “Hannah Fisher”)
Josiah building Gabriel’s bed and rigging a wheeled bed for his final days, quietly arranging burial beside Rachel and Jasper (Chapters 22 and 39)

12. Gabriel’s Body as Devotional Object and Marketable Asset

The novel presents Gabriel’s body as a site of both worship and exploitation. How does this duality unfold from his miraculous birth to his amputation and wrestling career?

Why this prompt matters: The central paradox of the narrative is that the same body that calms goats and inspires awe is also a commodity that attracts college recruiters, paparazzi, and a million-dollar porn offer. The novel critiques the English world’s appetite while admitting the Amish world’s unease with excess.

Sample thesis direction: Gabriel’s body functions as a mirror: to Hannah, it is evidence of God’s mysterious will; to Trey, a redemptive instrument; to the wrestling promoter, a profitable asset. The novel refuses to resolve which interpretation is true, instead tracing how each act of looking changes the looker.

Evidence leads:

The prologue’s note that Gabriel’s birth story “will become mythologized” (Prologue)
His healing effect on animals—the goat Magdalene, the hen Betsy, the opossum Virginia Woolf (Chapter 6, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The custom shovel made from two coal shovels and the pride Hannah takes in his garden work (Chapter 17, “Hannah Fisher”)
The “From Heaven to Hell” wrestling move and the prosthetic leg used as a weapon (Chapter 24, “Billy Walton”; Chapter 27, “Thomas Kennedy”)
The alderman’s offer to buy Gabriel’s shoes for a tourist display, which the family refuses (Chapter 42, “Hannah Fisher”)