Offshore Study Questions

OFFSHORE – STUDY QUESTIONS

1. What is the time and place setting of the story? Who are the main characters? How old are they?

2. Describe the characters of Nenna and Edward. What is their relationship like and how does it develop?

3. Describe the characters of Tilda and Martha. In what ways do they differ? Do you find the level of their maturity believable?

4. Describe the characters of Nenna and Richard. How does their relationship develop?

5. How does the story end? What do you think happened next?

6. Describe the characters of Richard and Laura. What is their relationship like and how does it develop?

7. Describe Heinrich and his relationship with Martha.

8. Describe Maurice. What is the nature of his connection to Harry?

9. Martha and Tilda’s education. Why have the girls discontinued schooling?

10. Describe Willis and what happens to him. 11. Nenna is going through an imaginary court trial throughout the book. What is going on there?

12. How does Nenna attempt to get her husband back? Does she succeed?

13. Describe the scenes that depict the girls’ exploits.

14. Who does Nenna confide to?

14. What might be the significance of the title Offshore, other than its obvious reference to living on houseboats? In what ways may Nenna, Richard, Maurice, and Willis all be characterized as “offshore”? In contrast, how is life “onshore” portrayed?

15. We learn that “Nenna’s attitude to truth was flexible, and more like Willis’s than Richard’s.” What are Nenna’s, Willis’s, Richard’s, and Maurice’s attitudes toward the “truth”? Do their attitudes toward it change?

16. There are repeated references to the ebb and flood of the river’s tide. What are some examples of how these fluctuating currents mirror the story’s events and the characters’ lives?

17. What prevents Nenna from reuniting with Edward? In what ways might both Nenna and Edward be responsible for their separation?

18. Fitzgerald writes that “the barge-dwellers . . . would have liked to be more respectable than they were . . . But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people caused them to sink back . . . into the mud moorings of the great tideway.” How do Nenna, Maurice, Willis, and even Richard embody that “certain failure,” and what prevents them from rectifying their situations?

19. In what ways do the boats’ conditions and names, Lord Jim, Grace, Dreadnought, Maurice, and the others, reflect the owners’ personalities and lives?

20. Maurice says to Nenna, “There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination.” What deters the characters from making decisions and experiencing happiness? Why might making a decision be “torment for anyone with imagination”?

21. What ironies emerge in the novel’s final scenes?