49 pages • 1 hour read
Russell BanksRule of the Bone
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
Bone narrates the book in a conversational, stream-of-consciousness style. How does this style help convey the themes of the book? Why would this character tell this story in this way? (You might pay particular attention to the moments when Bone directly addresses his audience and think about the speaker-listener contract at work.)
Before becoming close with I-Man, Bone has a negative opinion of the white kids in his hometown who have dreadlocks and embrace Rastafarian culture. Is Bone’s journey toward that lifestyle more authentic than theirs, or is he one of them? Can a person embrace a culture outside of their own?
How does Bone come to reject the “rules” of the world around him in favor of his own?
If “The Rule of the Bone” was a philosophical guide like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, what would its central tenets be?
Bone’s drug-induced vision portrays an ugly side of colonial history that he comes to associate with his own personal history. Outline the book’s themes of trauma as a criticism of colonial history.
Compare Rule of the Bone to either Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two novels with similar structures and themes. How do these books reflect their era?
Most of the characters in the novel fail to empathize with Bone, and he in turns often fails to empathize with the characters around him. How are Russ, or the twin brothers, or the bikers in the same situation as Bone? Who can Bone empathize with, and why?
Bone carries several stolen items from the Ridgeways’ summer home, and they each take on symbolic meaning. What do each of these items represent, and what does it mean that he leaves them all behind?
What factors make Bone reluctant to take on agency in his own life? Why does he spend so much of the novel letting others make decisions for him?
When Bone sees Russ at the end of the novel, he says it’s sad. What is sad about it to Bone, and what does that mean for the themes of the book?
Related Titles
By Russell Banks
