What You Pawn I Will Redeem

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What myths, folk tales, or works of literature can you think of that feature a quest? Try to come up with at least three.

Teaching Suggestion: Quest narratives are ubiquitous: The oldest written work of literature—The Epic of Gilgamesh—is in part the story of Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. The mission driving a quest is often the retrieval of a valuable or magical object (as in stories about the search for the Holy Grail) or the slaying of a monster (as in Beowulf). However, there are many quest narratives that break this pattern, including Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the quest for freedom) and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (the quest for spiritual enlightenment). Use students’ responses to spark conversation about what constitutes a quest: Although the quest in “What You Pawn I will Redeem” does center on a material object, it also has significant personal and spiritual dimensions.  

• “Robert Irwin’s top 10 quest narratives”: 2011 article for The Guardian in which writer Robert Irwin discusses works that feature spiritual quests
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