The Sound of Building Coffins
by Louis Maistros

Reading Group Discussion Questions

1. A running theme in The Sound of Building Coffins is the dilemma sometimes faced by people who must choose between doing what they believe is right over their own sense of loyalty and obedience to those who they love and respect. Noonday’s dilemma is that he feels he must disobey the words of God Himself in order to ultimately please God by doing what his heart tells him is right. As Noonday makes this difficult decision, Typhus is immediately presented with a similar decision in which he feels he must disobey his father in order to do what he believes his father needs of him. What are the consequences of these decisions in the book? Can you think of anyone (friend, relative or yourself) who has faced a similar question in their lives – and did their ultimate decision yield positive consequences, negative, or both? How does Doctor Jack’s unusual perception of God’s reason for creating the human race relate to such dilemma?

2. The journey of the first note of jazz described in Chapter 2 (The Note) is mirrored by the journey of Buddy Bolden’s blood as it is washed off his cornet into the Mississippi River in Chapter 45 (This is Blood). What other cultural phenomenon or transformation might this symbolic portrayal of the birth of jazz also be a metaphor for?

3.  At the end of Chapter 43 Typhus can remember the words to a song but not the melody. At the end of Chapter 39 he can remember the melody but not the words. What happened in these chapters that changes his perception of the song? In what ways does music inform the prose of this novel, just as the prose informs the music?

4. A consistent theme in this novel is how water touches all aspects of New Orleans, both spiritually and physically. How do you think the surrounding waters of New Orleans have shaped the lives of its residents in the novel and in real life? In the novel, water also plays into the city’s relationship with death itself; sometimes joyfully (as in the Spiritworld) and sometimes tragically (as with a hurricane). How do these things reconcile and balance each other out, and what is Marcus’ secret regarding the “circle of the river”?

5. Although The Sound of Building Coffins was written before the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one of the larger points of the novel is the city’s constant cycle of redemption and rebirth. The author believes that New Orleans was a city locked into a constant cycle of death and rebirth (with both tragic and joyous consequences) long before the Katrina disaster. How do these feelings of redemption connect the fictitious world of the novel to the realities faced by modern day New Orleanians?  Why do you think the author attached such heavy significance to the idea of “rebirth” as a way of life in New Orleans before the storm?

6. Although Jim Jam Jump seems purely a destructive force, the entity inside him is conflicted about its purpose. Can you see any good that has come from the apparently evil actions of Jim? Do you think that all his misdeeds are a product of the thing inside him, or does some of the blame go to the flesh and blood boy himself?

7. The Morningstars convince themselves that their “phantom benefactor” is actually the ghost of their dead father. Sometimes faith is invented in a person’s heart to fulfill a need. How do you think the Morningstar family benefited – spiritually, emotionally, or physically – by this erroneous (if hopeful) belief in the phantom’s identity? Can a belief such as this, one that is only meant to comfort, also cause harm?

8. Doctor Jack delivers a well-practiced speech to an unnamed young woman in Chapter 14  regarding the pros and cons of abortion – which he refers to as his “cure.” The recipient of this speech might be Diphtheria or it might be Hattie – or it might be both, at different times. It also may be any woman at all who finds herself in the tragic predicament of having to make such a difficult decision. As we later find in the novel, both Diphtheria and Hattie were at one time pregnant but came to different decisions regarding Dr. Jack’s “cure.” In each case there were unique reasons for their decisions, and unique results – both women experiencing a mixture of joy and heartache in the aftermath of their decisions. Discuss the spiritual journey of each woman in regards to their pregnancies and their apparent responses to Dr. Jack’s speech in “Calisaya Blues” (Chapter 14).

9. During the course of the game of tat, Jim not only manipulates the marks, but he also manipulates Dropsy (contrary to Dropsy’s own good conscience and high moral code) into believing that tricking people out of their money can be a form of ethical justice.  How does Jim manage to manipulate a morally sound person like Dropsy in such a way? Has anyone you know ever been manipulated in a similar way? Also, at what point in the novel does Dropsy get wise to Jim’s manipulations, and how does he turn the tables on him using Jim’s own methods of trickery?

10. Doctor Jack is a complex character, full of contradictions. Similar to the way Jim manipulates others with well-thought-out rationalizations, Jack seems to have a knack for manipulating himself into acts of poor judgment by convincing himself of his own good intentions. Although Jack’s intentions do seem to be good for the most part, name an instance in which he exercises poor judgment behind a carefully conceived (and perhaps self-serving) rationale – and describe how such self-deceit can yield devastating consequences on the people who trust and depend on him.

11. When Typhus is a child, he possesses the wisdom of an innocent; simple solutions to the difficulties of the human condition being easy for him to acknowledge and understand. As he gets older and life becomes more complicated, he loses his knack for the simple wisdom of his childhood self. The ultimate lesson learned by Typhus is that those childhood truths never stop being true, even if they become more difficult to believe in as one gets older. At what point does Typhus come to this realization? Is it a gradual realization, or a sudden one? Does this epiphany come too late to make a difference? If not, why not?

12. The brothers Typhus and Dropsy are opposite reflections of each other in several ways. Going into adulthood, Dropsy matures physically but not mentally – while Typhus matures mentally but not physically. What are the difficulties faced by each in regards to these differences? Would you say that each has matured similarly in the spiritual sense? How are they different from each other in this regard?

13. The following sentence can be found on page 302: “Noonday Morningstar looks down, slips his naked feet into the two shoes that had caused Malvina to fall.” This is meant literally, but also symbolically. In the larger and nonliteral sense, how has Malvina been caused to fall by “shoes,” and in what way has she fallen? Now that she is in the Spiritworld, where she is given answers to many of her life’s most haunting questions, how are things made right for her, spiritually? Where else in the novel are shoes an important symbolic image? What important revelations do “shoes” foreshadow in the novel?

14. On page 307 Noonday says to Malvina, “Perhaps the word you’ve been searching for all this time has been hello” and not goodbye. What does he mean by this?

15. In Chapter 48 the following line can be found: “In the Spiritworld there is a different kind of faith; and that is the blind, baseless belief that the living will somehow, and against all odds, find their way to redemption.” What does this mean in the context of the novel – and what might it mean to any person who believes in an afterlife?