Life, and Death, and Giants: Questions and Answers

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

1. Why does Thomas Kennedy deliver Gabriel with veterinarian’s cables?

In the prologue, teenaged Jasper brings his mother Rachel to Thomas because she refuses medical help and has been in labor for days. With no hospital option and Rachel dying, Thomas adapts livestock delivery equipment to pull the eighteen-pound infant out. The birth saves Gabriel but costs Rachel her life.

Evidence and interpretation: The prologue presents the birth as the moment that will strip Lakota of its obscurity, and Hannah’s later chapter titled “3. Hannah Fisher” recalls that Gabriel was pulled with a veterinarian’s cables. This origin makes Gabriel’s body a site where miracle and animalistic commodity blur, a tension that continues through the body as miracle and commodity.

2. What does Hannah’s secret Dickinson book tell us about her inner life?

Hidden in her mother’s belongings, the poetry volume gives Hannah a private language for faith and doubt in a household ruled by Absalom. She reads it in secret, feels stirred and troubled, and carries that practice of hidden reading into widowhood and later life.

Evidence and interpretation: In “1. Hannah Fisher,” she discovers the book after her mother’s death and treats it as both a spiritual awakening and a transgression. The same inherited reading habit returns in her later chapters when Dickinson’s words help her process Gabriel’s amputation and her own crisis of faith. The book connects Hannah Fisher to Dr. Kennedy’s mother, another Dickinson scholar.

3. Why does Billy Walton blame himself for how he treated Widow Charlotte?

Billy served Charlotte drinks and took her money but never asked about her health or her children, despite seeing the town mock her. After she takes in the shunned pregnant Rachel and later wills everything to her, Billy recognizes Charlotte as the community’s true moral compass.

Evidence and interpretation: In “2. Billy Walton,” he admits he could have shown her kindness and that she was more righteous than her religious neighbors. Her atheism and pipe-smoking eccentricity make her an outsider, yet her care for Rachel exposes the limits of community judgment. Billy’s guilt becomes one of the novel’s running reckonings.

4. What role does the river play in Hannah and Rachel’s secret meetings?

The river separates Hannah and Josiah’s farm from Charlotte’s property, visibly marking the divide between Amish life and the English world. Yet it also becomes a meeting point where mother and daughter reconnect in secret, with Josiah’s silent consent, after Rachel is shunned.

Evidence and interpretation: In “3. Hannah Fisher,” Hannah watches Rachel’s window, sings lullabies by the field, and later meets her daughter by the river over the years. The river functions as both boundary and bridge: custom keeps them apart, while love finds a way across. It is also the boundary Hannah must later cross when she leaves her marriage.

5. Why does Gabriel’s effect on animals matter to his character?

From early childhood Gabriel calms skittish cats, sheep, pigeons, and a favorite hen, and he later gentles elderly goats before slaughter. These scenes establish that his extraordinary size is matched by a tender, almost miraculous attunement to creatures.

Evidence and interpretation: In “4. Thomas Kennedy,” Thomas notices that animals are soothed by Gabriel’s presence, and in “12. Hannah Fisher,” Gabriel carries old ewes gently as Josiah culls them. These moments foreshadow the animal and insect gathering at his death in “40. Hannah Fisher.” Gabriel’s true power is not just strength; it is the grace he offers the vulnerable.

6. Why does Billy Walton lose interest in Little League after Josiah’s refusal?

After Josiah tells Billy that the Lord may have other plans and Gabriel has many gifts, Billy realizes the boy’s path may not be baseball. He broods, then channels his energy into the high school football team, which thrives under Coach Beathard.

Evidence and interpretation: In “5. Billy Walton,” Billy outfits Gabriel for T-ball and watches him hit .820 with 32 home runs. By “11. Billy Walton,” Josiah deflects the recruitment pitch, and Billy begins to release his hold on Gabriel’s future. His shift from baseball to football tracks the town’s changing hopes and anticipates Trey Beathard’s arrival.

7. What does Dorothy Kennedy’s confused conversation with Gabriel reveal?

Dorothy, who cannot recognize Thomas, suddenly speaks at length with nine-year-old Gabriel and tells him he will save the world. The whimsical exchange brings Thomas joy and deepens the bond between the two; afterward, Thomas takes Gabriel to the zoo.

Evidence and interpretation: In “8. Thomas Kennedy,” Dorothy’s dementia makes her an unlikely oracle, and her words foreshadow Gabriel’s later fame and strange fate. The scene also introduces Thomas’s childhood memories of solitary zoo visits and a captive gorilla named Samson. Thomas’s protective love becomes the emotional center of his relationship with Gabriel Fisher.

8. Why is Jasper’s suicide discovered only after a happy day?

Thomas and Gabriel spend the day in Milwaukee visiting Dorothy and the zoo, then return to find a pyramid of beer cans and Jasper missing. Gabriel finds Jasper hanged in the barn, and Thomas shields him. The contrast makes the loss brutal.

Evidence and interpretation: In “8. Thomas Kennedy,” Jasper has seemed selfless while raising Gabriel, so his hidden alcoholism and desperation come as a shock. The chapter shows how addiction and pain can hide behind caregiving, and how grief can arrive without warning. It also pushes Thomas into the role of full surrogate grandfather.

9. Why does Zurbarán’s painting renew Hannah’s faith in the Art Institute?

Hannah expects her father’s ban on art to make the museum transgressive, but the painting Christ on the Cross reminds her of Josiah and feels like worship. She recognizes God’s hand in artists’ work and takes Thomas’s hand gratefully.

Evidence and interpretation: In “26. Hannah Fisher,” Hannah remembers Absalom destroying a Michelangelo book and hesitates at the museum door, but the Zurbarán painting reframes art as devotion rather than vanity. Later, deep-dish pizza with oregano and red pepper flakes becomes a sensual, parentally forbidden pleasure. Her faith is not weakened by beauty; it is clarified by it.

10. Why do Hannah and Thomas leave the wrestling match before it ends?

The crowd mocks Amish dress, fans wear costumes, Gabriel enters carrying a live goat, and the staged violence turns savage when his prosthetic leg is used as a weapon. Hannah is overwhelmed and insists on leaving despite Thomas’s assurances it is scripted.

Evidence and interpretation: In “27. Thomas Kennedy,” the wrestling arena turns Gabriel into “Anakim, the Amish Giant,” and Hannah sees her grandson’s identity commodified for entertainment. Thomas explains that the violence is staged, but Hannah cannot watch. The scene dramatizes how disability and heritage can be packaged as spectacle.

11. Why is Absalom Yoder’s bathtub death treated as both accident and judgment?

Deputy Danny Albright rules the fire accidental—a tipped lamp and candles—but Billy openly calls Yoder cantankerous and jokes about karma. The town sees poetic justice in his scalding, unaware of the letter that will convict him far more seriously.

Evidence and interpretation: In “29. Billy Walton,” Billy lists Yoder’s grudges and petty cruelties, including blocking traffic with his buggy. In “30. Hannah Fisher,” the letter reveals a much darker history of incest and deception. The “accidental” death lets the town feel satisfied while Hannah carries the private burden of the truth.

12. What changes when Gabriel returns home blind and dying?

Gabriel’s terminal illness strips away his fame and brings him back into Hannah and Josiah’s care. In daily walks he reconnects with the sensory world, learns that Absalom is also his father, and begins telling stories, including the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.

Evidence and interpretation: In “34. Thomas Kennedy” and “35. Hannah Fisher,” Gabriel’s blindness narrows his world to birdsong, wind, and memory. The paternity revelation opens him emotionally, and later Bella arrives with his son Raphael. Mortality transforms his legacy from public spectacle into kinship and care.

13. Why does Hannah leave Josiah after reading Absalom’s letter?

The letter forces Hannah to see that Josiah’s silence made him complicit in what she calls a “bedrock of lies.” Devastated, she leaves her Amish home, sheds her kapp, buys English clothing, reads novels, and begins confessing her trauma while staying with Dr. Kennedy.

Evidence and interpretation: In “32. Hannah Fisher,” she shows the letter to Meg and confronts Josiah, whose silence confirms her fear. Her departure is both a rebellion against patriarchal abuse and a crisis of faith. It also sets up her later, unfinished relationship with Thomas Kennedy.

14. What does Hannah hope her embroidered dish towel will do for Gabriel?

She embroiders the closing paragraph of Rules of a Godly Life onto a towel with animals, vines, pumpkins, and a buggy, and tells Gabriel to open it on the plane. She hopes it will remind him of goodness and protect him as God protected Daniel.

Evidence and interpretation: In “21. Hannah Fisher,” Hannah admits her wish to keep Gabriel home is partly selfish envy of women with many descendants. She also recalls her mother’s proverb that you cannot put a pumpkin back into its seed. The towel is her way of sending Amish faith into the English world without trying to control what happens next.

15. How does Gabriel’s grave connect to the novel’s epigraph?

The epigraph calls life, death, and giants minor apparatus and fame a matter of accident. Gabriel dies at home, is buried beside Rachel opposite Jasper under a fossil-bearing limestone, and the town refuses to sell his shoes as a tourist display.

Evidence and interpretation: In “41. Billy Walton,” the funeral mixes hymns, a eulogy, and a coffin joke, while in “42. Hannah Fisher,” the family declines an alderman’s offer to display Gabriel’s shoes. The firefly pillar at his death suggests wonder, but no public monument marks his fame. The ending chooses obscurity and communal memory over spectacle, answering the randomness of renown named in the epigraph.