Discussion Topic
The stranger's quest in Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
Summary:
The stranger in Tuck Everlasting is on a quest to find the Tuck family and discover the secret of their immortality. He seeks to exploit this secret for his own gain, aiming to sell the water that grants eternal life to the highest bidder, reflecting his greed and unscrupulous nature.
What is the stranger looking for in Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt?
The stranger is the man in the yellow suit. He tells Winnie in Chapter Four that he is looking for a family.
The man lifted his eyebrows. "Oh," he said, "I'm looking for someone. A family."
The family that the man in the yellow suit is looking for is the Tuck family, but the stranger does not know who exactly they are. All that the man in the yellow suit knows is the story that his grandmother told him. That story was about a family that supposedly had the ability to live forever. They never changed.
"I was born west of here," he began, "and all the time I was growing up, my grandmother told me stories. They were wild, unbelievable stories, but I believed them. They involved a dear friend of my grandmother's who married into a very odd family. Married the older of two sons, and they...
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had two children. It was after the children were born that she began to see that the family was odd. This friend of my grandmother's, she lived with her husband for twenty years, and strange to say, he never got any older. She did, but he didn't. And neither did his mother or his father or his brother."
The man in the yellow suit believes his grandmother's story, and he decides to devote his life to seeking out and finding this family. He knows the general area of where to begin looking based on his grandmother's information, and the man in the yellow suit also knows that a particular music box tune is associated with the immortal family. When the man arrives in Treegap, he hears the tune while talking to Winnie in Chapter Four. The man in the yellow suit wants to find out the secret to the Tuck family's immortality and sell it for a large profit.
What information does the stranger seek in Tuck Everlasting?
The stranger, also known as the man in the yellow suit, wants to know the secret behind the Tuck family's immortality so that he can exploit it for financial gain. His quest for this knowledge had begun when he was a young boy, when his grandmother would tell him stories about this mysterious family. Somewhere along the line, he realized that if he knew the secret, he could market it as a key to everlasting life and become extremely wealthy.
The truth that the stranger wanted to know relates to the water in a small spring near Winnie's home. As the Tuck family had discovered decades earlier, the spring gives immortality to anyone who drinks from it. The rising action in this story consists of Jesse Tuck trying to dissuade Winnie from drinking the water and the Tuck family's decision to kidnap her to give them time to explain the situation to her and beg her to keep their secret.
Surreptitiously following them on this journey, the stranger hears the whole story and learns everything that he wants to know. What he does not understand, however, is the Tuck family's reasoning for wanting to prevent their secret from being spread. The stranger fails to understand the down sides of eternal life.