Chapter I: Did you cry with Stoner's mother?

In the first chapter, William Stoner doesn't come off as a very strong person, as one in charge of his own life. He went off to college on his parents' command. It wouldn't have occurred to Stoner to go to college, any more than it occurred to him later to stay for a master's degree or a doctoral degree; or any more than it occurred to him that he might stay as faculty at the University of Missouri. It certainly didn't seem to occur to Stoner to stand up for himself to his aunt and uncle Foote while they watched him work their farm for room and board.

Stoner's passivity (or apparent passivity) extends to his capacity for attention. He takes the sophomore literature survey because he must, and it bothers him. He doesn't even realize it bothers him until his professor singles him out one day in the classroom and tells him what he doesn't know: "Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?" Even then, the long hours puzzling over the poetry and prose that resisted his understanding, the failed exams, the apparently sudden and surprising switch from the agricultural science sequence to a course of study in the liberal arts appear to be absent from Stoner's attention, from his conscious awareness. They aren't part of any deliberate plan on Stoner's part. They are just things that are happening to him, episodes in his life, barely related, until his professor tells him, gently, "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

It would be saying too much to say that Stoner's life clicks into place and becomes complete and completely suffused with meaning when Professor Sloane gives him his life project. But once Sloane tells Stoner he is to be a teacher, Stoner has, at last, a frame for the story of his life. Then he can start filling in details and training his attention.

Did you cry with Stoner's mother at the end of the chapter? Did you put your fists to your face, feel your knuckles press deeply and painfully into the soft flesh of your cheeks? Did you notice the posture she must have held when you found yourself hunched over, eyes downcast, forehead furrowed? Did you feel for her when you imagined your mother thus? Did you feel for yourself when you pictured your own child, years from now, leaving you for a life you can't imagine?

What else did you notice?