Bel Canto Theme of Dreams, Hopes, and Plans

Trapped by terrorists, the hostages start plotting out their careers…um, sort of. But one of the fascinating things about Bel Canto is the way that being cooped up in a hostage situation does make the characters discover new dreams, hopes, and plans. For example:

• Mr. Hosokawa discovers what it's like to have a life outside of work, and to be really in love.
• Ruben Iglesias discovers a desire to adopt one of the teenage terrorists.
• Carmen and Gen start dreaming about a life together in the outside world, something they couldn't even have imagined before meeting each other in these strange and difficult circumstances.

That's partly because intense circumstances do often make people hope for new things or plan to change their lives if they survive. But it's also because Bel Canto is creating a fairy tale where everyone can imagine things they couldn't even have dreamed of before. But can those dreams and plans last back in the real world? That's one of the central questions of the book.

1. Which characters start to dream of or hope for new things? Are there any characters who continue to want roughly the same things throughout the book? If so, why?
2. Some of the things that characters hope for seem pretty unlikely. Is Bel Canto telling us they shouldn't hope for them, or telling us there's something worthwhile about hoping for unrealistic things even if you don't get them?
3. For the surviving characters mentioned in the Epilogue, how much of the new lives they imagined during the crisis do they get to keep, and in what ways? Is it different for different characters?

Many of the characters in Bel Canto are transformed so radically by the crisis that their lives will never be the same. Yet the lives they imagined while in the crisis are not sustainable in the world outside the house, so they need to carve new paths, different from both what they imagined before the crisis and what they imagined during it.

Father Arguedas and Simon Thibault are alike in having something outside the house that connects them to reality, so when they return to normal life they find it an easier transition than many of the others.