46 pages • 1 hour read
James ThurberThe Night the Ghost Got In
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1933A 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.
Essay Topics
What forms of irony does Thurber employ to heighten comedic effect? How else does irony function in the story?
My Life and Hard Times was published in 1933, but “The Night the Ghost Got In” takes place in 1915. How might WWI and WW2 have influenced themes within the narrative?
How does Thurber set the tone at the beginning of the story, and what tonal shifts occur that progress and heighten the events of the story? How do the various characters contribute to these changes in tone?
What might the ghost symbolize in the story? How might the presence of a ghost in the house connect to the absent family members?
Think about the characters outside of the Thurber family. What might the Thurbers’ interactions with them reveal about the community as a whole? How does this relate to larger themes?
How does this story function in concurrence with the rest of the collection? What does it reveal about the family that will inform later stories?
How does Grandfather’s “flashback” act as a juxtaposition against the other characters’ fear of the unknown?
Discuss the role of truth in the story. How does Thurber paint himself as an unreliable narrator? Compare Thurber’s reliability to that of other characters.
Thurber was mostly blind at the time of writing the story due to a childhood accident. How might Thurber’s near blindness relate to the role of light in the story and to the tenuous relationship between fact and fiction?
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By James Thurber
