A Study Guide for Russell Banks's "The Sweet Hereafter"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Russell Banks's "The Sweet Hereafter," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839907

Book preview

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The Sweet Hereafter

Russell Banks

1991

Introduction

Russell Banks's sixth novel, The Sweet Hereafter tells the tragic story of a school bus accident, revealing how it impacts the lives of individuals as well as the community as a whole. In The Reading List, Contemporary Fiction, Banks is quoted as saying, I wanted to write a novel in which the community was the hero, rather than a single individual. Although the story is told from the perspectives of four individual narrators, the importance of the community emerges as a strong unifying element.

The Sweet Hereafter has been embraced by critics and readers alike for its unique narrative structure. Banks's intention in writing the novel this way was to avoid what he considers the artifice of omniscient narration and the somewhat preachy tone that often accompanies it. Instead, Banks chose to tell the story four times, each time from a different perspective that is unique, realistic, and limited. The result is a more intimate tone that allows the reader to understand how a single incident can create such different feelings in different individuals. The narration reveals varied threads of guilt, blame, and recovery, and places them in the larger fabric of a community's reaction to a tragedy.

Author Biography

Russell Earl Banks was born March 28, 1940, in Newton, Massachusetts, the eldest of Earl and Florence Banks' four children. They were a working-class family who reared their children in Barnstead, New Hampshire. Banks's early life was fraught with difficulty. He endured near-poverty with his family and watched his parents' marriage decline into divorce. Today, Banks is married to his fourth wife and is the father of four daughters.

At the age of eighteen, Banks enrolled at Colgate College but dropped out after only eight weeks. He felt out of place because his fellow students were wealthy. He decided to join Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba but could only afford to go as far as Florida, where he took odd jobs and lived in a trailer park. At that time, he began writing short fiction. In the mid-1960s, he traveled to the Yucatán and Jamaica; these experiences would later appear in his fiction as would his memories of life in rural New England.

Banks completed an English degree at the University of North Carolina in 1967 and has since written a succession of novels and short