The Sweetness of Water

Nathan Harris uses contrasts between light and dark at multiple points in the novel, whether it is when describing the forest, the town and the shadows that live there, or the interior of the Walker cabin. What do these contrasts suggest? Do these images provide a parallel storyline of their own?

The narrator suggests that the town of Old Ox has burned down several times, or at other times fell on hard times and must be rebuilt. What is symbolic about the fire that occurs after George, Caleb, and Prentiss leave town?

While the novel tends to focus on race relations between white and Black men in the American South immediately following the Civil War, there is some focus on the relationship between women at this time. What is the nature of that relationship? How do women address their roles following the war?

Landry and Isabelle both find freedom in silence at various points in the novel. How does Harris create silence as a motif in his novel? How does silence function both literally and figuratively throughout the story?

Nathan Harris presents readers with controversial and at times graphic relationships (George and Clementine meeting at a brothel; Caleb and August having a sexual relationship at the pond). Why, keeping in mind that Harris is writing a historical novel, might he have included such overt detail to these relationships? What does the novel gain by including these relationships? Do they hurt the novel’s historical significance at all?

Nathan Harris relies heavily on storytelling through flashback. What do we learn about the people of Old Ox in these flashbacks, and is this an effective method of storytelling? How does this method of narration underscore some of the central themes that Harris presents in his novel?

Considering the events that unfold in the novel and those events faced by the United States in the wake of the Civil War, should readers consider Harris’s novel a hopeful, positive reading of the future? Why or why not?

At one point in the novel, the narrator says of George, “he felt a great release, the opening of a space within him that might allow for something new to sprout—something good, something worth living for” (71-72). The clearing of the forest to make way for a peanut farm is an ambitious goal for George. Why does he feel such a release from this activity? What does his struggle with chopping down the trees suggest in this context?