The Fountains of Silence: A Novel

What does it mean to be “complicit” with an oppressive government? What messages does Fountains of Silence send about complicity? Use these questions to aid you in developing a response:

• Which characters make choices that support the government’s power?
• Do these characters always understand that this is what they are doing?
• What are some of their motivations for supporting the government’s power?
• How does their complicity impact both themselves and other people?
• How do Puri’s comments in the novel’s final chapter and the news articles that follow this final chapter shed light on the novel’s ideas about silence and complicity?
• Does this novel seem to condemn people who choose Silence over Resistance—or who cooperate with the Franco government in other ways—or does it have compassion for them?

Teaching Suggestion: Before students begin to discuss or write in response to this prompt, they may find it useful to have a brief discussion about the many forms that complicity can take. This will allow them to recognize a broader variety of examples in the text and think more deeply about these examples as they decide what messages about complicity are being conveyed. Students may be tempted to quickly arrive at facile answers such as “complicity is bad,” but the messages in Fountains of Silence are much more nuanced than this. It may be helpful to them to try categorizing examples into types based on motives, impact, etc., and consider what patterns they see emerging.

Differentiation Suggestion: English learners, students with dyslexia, and those with attentional or executive function differences may struggle to review enough text to gather the necessary examples of complicity in the novel. These students may benefit from working in small groups or with a partner to gather examples. Organizing their thinking enough to discern patterns of meaning may present an obstacle for students with attentional and executive function challenges; you may wish to offer these students a graphic organizer within which they can categorize examples and show the relationships among categories. Students who struggle with written expression might be allowed to turn in such an organizer in lieu of complete written responses.