93 pages • 3 hours read
Joyce Carol OatesBig Mouth & Ugly Girl
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 6-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
At home, Ursula sees a TV news report on the bomb threat at Rocky River High. Upset by this and her performance in basketball, she emails Ms. Schultz and quits the team. At dinner, her mother feigns interest in a vegetarian dish Ursula made for herself. Ursula has been vegetarian now for years; she even used to eat separately from her family, since she did not like to sit at a table with people eating meat. She resumed participating in family meals since her father has so little time to eat with his family anyway, and would like to do it together with her. Lisa has also become a vegetarian, taking after her sister.
Ursula’s mother asks her about the game, but Ursula reveals little. Her mother discovers her injury and apologizes for missing the game, saying her schedule and the effort of “maintaining this house, my life” with her husband absent is “complicated” (52). Ursula believes her parents may be separating based on a conversation between them she overheard last summer.
At 10 o’clock Ursula’s mother sees the news; Matt is still unnamed as the accused. Distressed, she asks Ursula about it. Ursula insists the bomb threat is nothing more than a rumor but does not mention she witnessed Matt’s joke. Her mother pushes for more information, and Ursula notices she is slightly drunk.
In her room, Ursula impulsively writes Matt an email telling him to call her.
Chapter 7 Summary
Matt receives Ursula’s email. He has been suspended from school for three days pending an investigation. Matt is embarrassed that his friends will be questioned and that he had to hand over a copy of his play for analysis.
Matt emailed all his friends to corroborate his story but none have answered. Only Ursula Riggs has reached out. Matt muses that it “would be ironic if, out of the whole school, of Matt’s numerous friends and acquaintances and classmates, only Ursula Riggs, whom he scarcely knew, was contacting him” (60).
Matt is angry that his friend Skeet, who egged on his jokes in the cafeteria, hasn’t gotten in trouble as well. Matt had to call his father’s hotel in Atlanta to tell him the news. Like his mother, Matt’s father asked if there was any truth to the claim. He also asked if their name was in the news yet, sounding drunk on the phone.
Matt sits with his dog Pumpkin in his bedroom, wondering why Ursula Riggs emailed him. He again notes he “had to admire” (64) Ursula for her anarchist streak: “He’d have liked to be an anarchist himself. Instead he’d been a good boy. […] only just pretending to be rebellious with his ‘humor’” (64).
Matt calls Ursula, and Ursula reveals she heard Matt and can verify that he was joking. She says she would do the same “for anybody… even somebody I didn’t like” (66).
Chapter 8 Summary
It is Friday morning. Ursula’s parents have learned of her intention to act as a witness for Matt, and Ursula’s mother desperately tries to convince her to stay out of it, lest it jeopardize her chances at getting into a good college. Ursula refuses, seeing the event as a matter of principle.
In a meeting with Mr. Parrish, the school principal, Ursula confirms Matt’s threats were made completely in jest. She also notes her interpretation can be corroborated by her friend Eveann McDowd, who was also present in the cafeteria. She furthermore insists the investigation be called off; she sees Mr. Parrish’s hesitance to do so as a sign of personal weakness.
Ursula finds Eveann, who refuses to attest to Matt’s innocence based on her mother’s advice against it. Ursula calls Mrs. McDowd to insist Eveann serve as a witness, and Mrs. McDowd allows Eveann to do so.
Chapter 9 Summary
It is Monday, during school hours, and Matt is home on suspension. Returning from a snow-blown hike with Pumpkin, Matt wonders how Ursula is progressing at school.
His friends have finally emailed him back, all steering clear of the issue on advice of their parents. He has also overheard his father, now back home, on the phone threatening to sue the school.
When he returns from his hike, Matt’s mother excitedly tells him to pick up the phone. It is a teacher who tells Matt the whole issue was deemed a misunderstanding and he can return to school.
Matt emails Ursula, thanking her profusely for helping him.
Chapters 6-9 Analysis
These chapters cover the immediate developments following Matt’s interrogation by the police: Matt endures a full investigation and is suspended from school, Ursula takes efforts to clear Matt’s name, and Matt’s parents resolve to sue the school district for defamation, among other damages. These events constitute the narrative’s rising action, and following their resolution in Chapter 9, in which Matt is cleared of suspicion, they complete the novel’s first act.
Though structured around Matt’s problem as the main narrative facet, these chapters have much more to do with Ursula, who reveals her strong will and principled character in being the sole person to stand up for Matt against the will of several adults. She does this despite having no real social connection to Matt, revealing herself as a truly moral person. This is unlike Matt’s other friends, none of whom helped Matt in his time of need. Notably, Ursula uses email to begin this conversation; this medium will become a special line of connection between Matt and Ursula throughout the book.
Where Ursula shows herself as strong and determined in these chapters (notably an inversion of the passive feminine role some might expect of a high school girl), Matt shows himself as relatively vulnerable by contrast. This vulnerability, in Matt’s mind, comes from his need to be liked. Indeed, for the second time in the book, Matt acknowledges that he admires people like Ursula for their strength and the lack of value they place on people’s opinions of them. Of course, this is an ironic component of the relationship between Matt and Ursula. Though Matt sees her as very strong, Ursula’s strong persona is in many senses a construction made to mask her shyness.
These chapters bring Matt and Ursula together by nature of their events. However, the similarity of their family lives reveals an innate parallelism between Matt and Ursula. Both Matt and Ursula are elder children with younger siblings the same sex as them. Both Ursula and Matt have distant fathers involved in business and stay-at-home mothers struggling to cope with raising their families alone. This parallelism continues to develop over the course of the book.
Finally, other important plot elements make their first appearance in these chapters. Alongside more details about the two protagonists’ family lives, these chapters introduce the Rocky River Nature Preserve and Pumpkin, the Donaghy family dog. The preserve will become an important setting as the scene of Matt’s attempted suicide in later chapters, and Pumpkin will become a crucial character in the subplot of this dog’s abduction by school bully Trevor Cassity in the book’s final act.
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