Great Questions About Great Books
In this section we are looking for that great question that tends to cause discussants to consider a work in it entirety. The Great Books Foundation has been masterful at creating these kinds of questions for their works in their anthologies. Two of their rules are that:

you care about the answer
it is an honest question, you are not satisfied with your answer

The sample for this inaugural issue is the question I have about James Joyce's The Dead. Early in the work Gabriel gives a dimmer speech in which he says:

"Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always, we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living."

Yet at the end of the work Gabriel gives a soliloquy in which he says:

"One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

His dimmer speech anticipates the brooding of the final soliloquy. So the question is which instance is he speaking the "truth"? Apparently most readers "buy" the soliloquy, but I am still not fully convinced. I think his advice in the dimmer speech still applies. The question has certainly elicited some excellent discussion.

A related question that also tends to make discussants consider the entire text is asking "who all is included in 'the dead'"? Besides the matter of who is physically dead and emotionally dead, the hold of the past is certainly another aspect of this category.