79 pages • 2 hours read
Neverwhere
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During Reading
Reading Questions & Paired Texts
Reading Check and Short Answer questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.
PROLOGUE-CHAPTER 4
Reading Check
1. To what mundane item does Richard’s impromptu fortune relate?
2. Where did Richard meet Jessica?
3. For whom does Richard mistake Croup and Vandemar?
4. What does Lord Ratspeaker’s domain remind Richard of?
5. Why is the market assumed to be a safe place?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How would you describe Richard’s character?
2. Are Jessica and Richard compatible?
3. In what way does Door’s character subvert expectations?
4. What is the first sign that something has gone horribly wrong in Richard’s life?
5. How does Gaiman use setting to help characterize Croup and Vandemar?
Paired Resource
- In this essay written a few years before the publication of the novel, Lars Eighner examines his own experiences of being unhoused, his role in the urban landscape, and the lessons, practical and ethical, he has learned from dumpster diving.
- This essay connects loosely to the theme of Sacrifice; in letting go of social norms, Eighner gains valuable insight.
- Though Gaiman and Eighner both subvert reader expectations regarding those who have “fallen through the cracks” of society, their writing styles differ. Compare and contrast their approaches to the topic of the unhoused. Which approach do you feel is more effective for convincing you to see society differently, and why?
CHAPTERS 5-9
Reading Check
1. What traits does Richard associate with London Above?
2. What kind of creature is Islington?
3. Why does Door turn back for Richard when his return to London Above is deemed impossible?
4. What is the Earl’s real domain?
5. What unlikely item ties Door, Richard, Jessica, and Mr. Stockton together at the British Museum?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why has Richard never seen anyone fight like Hunter?
2. What does it mean that Richard has “slipped through the cracks”?
3. What happens to Lear, and what does this detail show about de Carabas’s character?
4. What is the Beast of London?
5. Why are Croup and Vandemar annoyed by their employer’s instructions?
6. What catastrophes do Croup and Vandemar claim to have caused?
Paired Resource
“The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots”
- This fairytale by Charles Perrault offers students a chance to explore allusion and sift through source material related to the Marquis de Carabas.
- In the fairytale, the miller’s youngest son is left with nothing but a cat, but after gaining the son’s Trust and striking a bargain with him to repay the favor, the cat uses cunning and trickery to turn the boy into a rich nobleman.
- Door mentions that the Marquis de Carabas took his name from a story. How might knowing the story of “Puss in Boots” add to reader understanding of de Carabas? Based on evidence in the story and the novel, do you expect de Carabas to keep his word to Door?
CHAPTERS 10-13
Reading Check
1. What does Islington send Door and Richard to find?
2. What might Richard’s ordeal represent?
3. What artifact helps Richard endure the Black Friars’ Ordeal?
4. Who is Croup and Vandemar’s employer?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What role do dreams play in characterizing Door, Hunter, and Richard?
2. What ironic role does Lady Serpentine claim Richard has taken on in their quest?
3. Why must Croup and Vandemar keep Door alive?
4. Explain the dramatic irony of Door assuring Richard that de Carabas will not let them down at the Belfast Floating Market.
Paired Resource
- Gaiman’s 4-minute retelling in Norse Mythology of Odin’s ordeal and sacrifice for knowledge offers students a chance to explore mythological source material and themes.
- Inspired by mythology, Gaiman incorporates imagery and symbols of Sacrifice.
- Gaiman borrows widely from mythology in many of his novels, including Neverwhere. Compare the imagery and treatment of the theme of Sacrifice in the story of Odin and Mimir with Richard’s ordeal. What messages do both support regarding the theme of Sacrifice?
CHAPTERS 14-17
Reading Check
1. What does the silver box de Carabas left with Old Bailey allow him to do?
2. What does Lamia ask for in payment for her work as their guide?
3. For what does Hunter betray Door?
4. What does the Labyrinth at the bottom of Down Street hide?
5. For what is Islington both responsible and unremorseful even after centuries in prison?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. In what way is Down Street aptly named?
2. What materials make up the Labyrinth?
3. How do Richard, de Carabas, and Hunter lose their way in the Labyrinth?
4. Why does Hunter help Richard kill the beast even though it was her desire to do so herself?
5. What allusion helps Richard and readers reconcile the twist that the angel, Islington, has been the villain in the shadows all along?
6. How does Door defeat Islington?
Paired Resource
- This site includes the complete version of the dirge that Richard remembers after Hunter’s death.
- “Lyke Wake Dirge” presents examples of actions in life that lead toward Christian Redemption or damnation after death.
- In what ways does this poem connect to Hunter’s character? Which fate, by the song’s logic, might Hunter face?
CHAPTERS 18-20
Reading Check
1. Who collects Hunter’s body and the spear?
2. What identity has Richard earned in his quest?
3. Who is the master of the real key Islington wanted?
4. Who knights Richard with Hunter’s knife?
5. What favor does Richard’s knighthood convey?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why was the key Islington wanted so special?
2. In what ways might the location where Richard emerges from the underground on his way back to London Above be symbolic?
3. In what important ways has Richard changed since his experiences in London Below?
4. In what ways does the falling action mirror the story’s exposition?
Paired Resource
- This 10-minute oral reading of a short story by Gaiman contains a familiar set of tropes.
- Just as the angelic imagery associated with Islington inspires the reader’s instant Trust, an unassuming character orchestrates a twisted Betrayal by the end.
- What stylistic and narrative elements appear in both Neverwhere and “Click Clack the Rattlebag”? In what ways do both stories explore the theme Betrayal Versus Trust?
Recommended Next Reads
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
- This urban fantasy follows the coming of age of Quentin Coldwater, who struggles to find happiness in the success-oriented world of New York City. When he is selected to attend a secret school for budding magicians, he realizes that even magic cannot guarantee happiness and that power comes at great cost.
- Shared themes include Trust Versus Betrayal and Sacrifice.
- Shared topics include magic, monsters, quests, and alternate realities.
- The Magicians on SuperSummary
The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
- This dark fantasy retelling of The Great Gatsby follows Vietnamese golfer, socialite, and othered outsider Jordan Baker as she navigates high society from the margins in an increasingly hostile New York teeming with demons and illicit magic. As laws pass prohibiting magic and threatening to expel immigrants from the country, Jordan must decide whether she can trust her costly alliance with Daisy Buchanan to shield her from danger or if she will unlock her own power for herself.
- Shared themes include Trust Versus Betrayal and Sacrifice.
- Shared topics include secret realities, magic, a character who is an outsider, and vivid, otherworldly settings.
- The Chosen and the Beautiful on SuperSummary
Reading Questions Answer Key
PROLOGUE-CHAPTER 4
Reading Check
1. Doors (Prologue)
2. The Louvre (Chapter 1)
3. Mormons/Jehovah’s Witnesses/the police (Chapter 2)
4. Hell (Chapter 3)
5. A market truce allows visitors to feel safe. (Chapter 4)
Short Answer
1. Richard comes across as passive and disorganized but reliably kind. At the beginning, he is just going through the motions in life; he chooses not to correct his girlfriend about his likes and dislikes, allows her to buy him his clothing, and purchased an engagement ring only when she suggested it. (Prologue-Chapter 4)
2. Jessica and Richard have a mutual attraction, but they lack basic compatibility because they do not share interests or values. They seem to be together out of convenience. (Chapters 1-3)
3. Though she is small, young-looking, helpless in appearance, and wearing layers of torn rags like an unhoused person, she has an extremely powerful magic and comes from an aristocratic family. (Chapters 1-4)
4. Once Door leaves, Richard is mostly invisible to the Londoners around him. His invisibility becomes more and more apparent as the day progresses until it seems as though he never existed. (Chapter 4)
5. Descriptions of their home base in an old hospital basement represent a state of decay and dilapidation and filled with sharp, painful, and rusting medical implements that they use to torture animals. These details help build a firm association between these characters and fear, loathing, and moral decay. (Chapter 4)
CHAPTERS 5-9
Reading Check
1. Comfort and safety (Chapter 5)
2. An angel (Chapter 5)
3. Guilt (Chapter 5)
4. Lost and forgotten things (Chapter 7)
5. Stockton’s angel collection (Chapter 9)
Short Answer
1. No one in London Above needs to fight to survive in the way those who have fallen through the cracks with the monsters do. (Chapter 5)
2. Contact with London Below has made him a citizen of it, and so he has ceased to exist in London Above. (Chapter 5)
3. The magicked tune de Carabas gave Lear to charm coins from passersby turns sinister, charming them so that they trample Lear to hear the tune. This detail heightens suspicions about the Marquis de Carabas’s morality and therefore calls his loyalty into question. (Chapter 7)
4. It is a boar that escaped long ago and slipped through the cracks of the world to become a legendary creature, achieving the same status as a sort of urban legend like New York’s sewer alligators. (Chapter 8)
5. The employer wants them just to scare Door and her companions, not harm her. Croup and Vandemar, however, are in business to cause as much harm as possible. (Chapter 8)
6. They claim to have caused the burning of Troy and the Black Plague, as well as the deaths of several kings and popes and a few minor gods. (Chapter 8)
CHAPTERS 10-13
Reading Check
1. A key (Chapter 10)
2. Death and rebirth (Chapter 12)
3. Anaesthesia’s quartz stone (Chapter 12)
4. Islington (Chapter 13)
Short Answer
1. The dreams they have in Lady Serpentine’s stable show Hunter’s desire to kill the London Beast and Richard’s destiny to face down the London Beast. Dreams serve a warning to Door that someone may have baited them down the path they follow by tampering with her father’s recording after his death. (Chapter 10)
2. She calls him Door’s hero, which is ironic considering his meek traits and softness from his life in London Above. However, he did save her in London Above, and their story is not complete. (Chapter 10)
3. Door is the only person who can use the key she has been sent to the Blackfriars to retrieve. (Chapter 10)
4. This comment comes just after a scene in which Dunniken has fished the dead Marquis de Carabas out of the sewers. This creates tension because the reader knows he has died but Door does not. It also does not completely rule out her words, as she does not claim he will be at the market, just that he won’t let them down. (Chapter 13)
CHAPTERS 14-17
Reading Check
1. Resurrect de Carabas (Chapter 14)
2. Richard’s warmth (Chapter 15)
3. A legendary spear (Chapter 15)
4. A citadel that is Islington’s prison (Chapter 16)
5. Sinking Atlantis (Chapter 17)
Short Answer
1. Not only must one take an elevator down to enter the street, but it is also a twisting pathway that leads down into darkness for thousands of feet. (Chapter 15)
2. It is made from pieces of England that fell through the cracks and became unstuck in time, and they constantly move and shift around one another, preventing escape. (Chapter 16)
3. The Marquis de Carabas trips over a decaying body and drops the magic chess piece into the marsh. When Richard tries to recover it, a burst of swamp gas buries it forever. (Chapter 16)
4. She is terribly wounded and cannot do it herself, and in her last minutes, she realizes she was wrong to betray Door for her own gain and seeks redemption. (Chapter 16)
5. The Marquis de Carabas reminds Richard that Lucifer was also an angel and that when angels fall to darkness, they fall the farthest. (Chapter 16)
6. Door tricks Islington into letting her loose and then opens a door to halfway across space and time. The door swallows Islington up as well as Croup and Vandemar. (Chapter 17)
CHAPTERS 18-20
Reading Check
1. Lady Serpentine (Chapter 18)
2. The Warrior (Chapter 19)
3. Richard (Chapter 19)
4. The Earl (Chapter 19)
5. Freedom of the Underside (Chapter 19)
Short Answer
1. It is the key to all reality. This implies it can open every possibility, including the possibility of sending Richard home. (Chapter 19)
2. It is dawn over an island that is much older than London. This is perhaps symbolic of the length of his quest and his rebirth into the world above; it also may represent the unity of his past with his present self. (Chapter 19)
3. Richard is more assertive and willing to speak up for himself, as evidenced by his ability to both recognize and verbalize that Jessica is not right for him; he also demonstrates assertiveness by claiming an apartment upgrade. Additionally, he soon grows dissatisfied with the life he is living because his old dream no longer fits the person he has become. (Chapter 20)
4. The story begins with Richard bored and unhappy at a party on the eve of starting a new life for himself. When Richard returns to London, he has an office at work and a better apartment. Soon, though, he feels disillusioned and unsatisfied with his personal and professional prospects and chooses to go once again to London Below. (Chapter 20)
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