What do you make of the final sentence? What will be an ideal ...

[EAugust]

What do you make of the final sentence?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Are Enn and Vic static or dynamic characters? How have they changed bythe storys end?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[sokh]

Answer to Question 1

• To fully understand the last sentence, you should reread paragraphs 106-108 and 115, in which Triolet tells an uncomprehending Enn how the history of her race was encoded in a poem to be passed on and take root elsewhere, inhabiting and forever changing those to whom it was transmitted. Clearly, Enn has become one of these.

Answer to Question 2

Vic, who previously seemed to possess an air of smooth and unflappable confidence, has been shaken to his core by his experience with Stella (whose name, of course, means starthe astronomical kind). At first all he can do is get out the words She wasnt a, leaving it to our imaginations to finish the sentence: a girl? a human? He implies that hed reached a point with her at which to go any further would have meant becoming something very different, something he emphatically does not wish to become. Enn, who is still unable to make sense of the nights events, seems to assume that Vic is alluding to the prospect of losing his virginity. Since his encounter with Triolet, he has begun to speak in more mystical, metaphorical terms, as if struggling to express something he cant fully grasp, let alone put into words. Part of this, perhaps, is the coloration of the adult sensibility looking back on this adolescent experience, but only a part. We are also left to speculate that Vic may have been so disgusted and ashamed that he couldnt face Enn again after that night. The two boys have reacted to their experiences in very different ways, echoing Triolets observation that there are places that we are welcomedand places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated (par. 111).