Reading Group Guide

East of the Mountains

By David Guterson

About the book:

Ben Givens is a retired heart surgeon who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Deciding to take
charge of his own demise, Ben travels into the wild country of Washington state with his two dogs and
his father’s Winchester, to hunt one last time and then to end his life on his own terms. But, as with all
quests, the Fates intervene. A car wreck introduces him to various helpers and hindrances, and gradually
Ben undertakes a journey back through his own past. As he nears the apple-growing country in which he
grew up, he recalls the signal events of his youth and manhood-especially his wartime experiences and
his profound love for his wife of fifty years. Ben is transformed into an American Odysseus as he
confronts the many sides of his own nature in a novel that radiates with the glories of the natural world
and the mysterious permutations of the human heart.

Discussion Questions:

Q. What is the importance-literal and symbolic-of Ben’s movement eastward? What qualities are
associated, through image and direct statement, with the concept of "east"?

Q. Most quest novels feature young men or women on journeys of discovery. What effects result from
Guterson’s presentation of a dying seventy-three-year-old man embarking on a journey of rediscovery?
What does Ben Givens (re)discover?

Q. Do you think that coincidence and chance occur too often in the novel? What might be Guterson’s
purpose in countering Ben’s lifelong "judicious deliberation" and "attention to all particulars" with the
accidents and chance encounters he experiences? What is the significance of the several references to
miracles?

Q. If "Suicide was at odds with the life he knew, at odds with all he understood, of himself and of the
world," why does Ben plan such a carefully thought-out, staged suicide? How would you describe Ben’s
understanding "of himself and of the world"? Does that understanding change during Ben’s three days
east of the mountains?

Q. "He had been born in the cradle of apple orchards," Guterson writes of Ben, "and it was this world he
wanted to return to." How important to Ben is this return to the apple-orchard country of the Columbia
Basin at the height of the apple harvest? Given Ben’s views on death and dying, why does he want to
end his life in this "cradle"? What is significant in the fact that Ben’s view of his family’s old orchard is
from a moving bus while he is busy with the ill migrant picker?
Q. Do Ben’s memories of family, Rachel, and war serve only to provide us with details of his past life?
What bearing on Ben’s present does each of his memories have? How do those memories help us
understand Ben’s life and behavior?

Q. At the end of chapter two, Ben recalls that he and Rachel, on their honeymoon, "had kissed with the
sadness of newlyweds who know…that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time,
which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful."To what extent
has time crushed the desired and the beautiful in Ben’s life? To what extent do his experiences during
his three-day journey counter that disquieting observation?

Q. Why does Guterson pay so much attention to details of landscape and natural phenomena? Through
what kinds of landscape, both past and present, does Ben travel? How is Guterson’s presentation of
each landscape important in terms of the corresponding stage in Ben’s life and of his view of life at each
stage?

Q. What role does hunting play in Ben’s life? What kinds of hunting does he participate in or observe,
and what are the purposes and consequences? In what ways does his attitude toward hunting change?

Q. How are the episodes involving the wolfhounds and their consequences significant, particularly in
terms of Ben’s inability to control or influence events? What details of landscape and time of night give
these episodes particular import? Why does Ben, having found William Harden near his journey’s end,
relinquish the gun to the wolfhound owner with the statement, "That gun is cursed"?

Q. As he settles Rex into the cab of Stu Robinson’s tractor-trailer, Ben thinks, "There were no good
answers to important questions." What are the important questions, from Ben’s perspective? What
answers does he find? Which of those answers, if any, are "good"?

Q. What is the importance of Ben’s experience in the field hospital in Italy, and of Ben’s memory of that
experience? Why is this memory presented in such detail? What influence did the Army surgeon have
on Ben?

Q. In his Quincy motel room, Ben opens the Gideon Bible to the Book of Job and reads the verses that
begin, "Days of affliction have taken hold upon me." And, on the bus to Wenatchee, he refers to Don
Quixote as "Knight of the Mournful Countenance." Are the correspondences implied by these references
justified? In what ways might Ben be compared to Job and Don Quixote? What other biblical and literary
references occur, and what are their relevance?

Q. Sitting in the restaurant with Emilio, Ben decides that "the life of the boy-of anyone-was a life, in the
end, and no mere story to be told across the table. The essentials could not be culled from the rest
without divesting both certain meanings." What bearing might this realization have on our acceptance
of the story of Ben’s life?