The Blue Guitar Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, The Man With the Blue Guitar: A Poem and our BookBrowse Review of The Blue Guitar.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Introduction
Oliver Otway Orme—a man equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating—is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who has never been caught . . . until now. Unfortunately, the purloined possession in question is the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend. Fearing the consequences, Ollie has fled—not only from his mistress, his home, and his wife, but from the very impulse to paint, and from his own demons. He sequesters himself in the house where he was born, and thus, he sets about trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did. A witty and trenchant novel about artistic creation and the ways in which we learn to possess one another—and hold on to ourselves—The Blue Guitar shows Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville at the peak of his powers.



Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. What do the title of the novel and its epigraph reflect about the kind of story told and the narrative point of view taken in The Blue Guitar?
2. How does Olly gain the reader's trust—or not—from the opening pages of the book? Where does he fall on the spectrum of unreliable narrators?
3. How does Olly's way of looking at the world—of observing the people and things around him—and his translation of that view into words illustrate his artistic proclivities?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.