93 pages • 3 hours read
Joyce Carol OatesBig Mouth & Ugly Girl
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
It is a Thursday in January. High school junior Matt Donaghy is in his homeroom class at Rocky River High School in Westchester County, New York, working feverishly on his one-act play. Two detectives from the police department arrive and escort him out of class. Embarrassed to have this happen in front of Stacey Flynn, a popular girl and “the nearest Matt Donaghy had to a girlfriend” (6), Matt assumes there has been an accident at home. Once in the hall, one of the detectives says, “Son, you know why we’re here” (7).
Chapter 2 Summary
On the same afternoon Matt Donaghy is questioned by the police, Ursula Riggs is in the moment of “str[iking] out” (8), or missing a penalty free throw in a Rocky River High basketball game.
Through first-person narration in the moment of striking out, Ursula, who calls herself Ugly Girl, describes herself as large bodied, tall, and highly athletic. Shy about her body in middle school, especially when she had to give up competitive swimming and diving due to her physique, Ursula now proudly calls herself Ugly Girl. In this persona she defies the feminine norms she feels are forced on her by society. Instead, she is “Ugly Girl, warrior-woman” (12).
Competitive in all sports, Ursula is attached to her gym teacher, Ms. Schultz, who was “kind of an ugly girl herself [… and] always named [Ursula] team captain” (8). Ugly Girl is also subject to moods that overtake her like uncontrollable storms and range from “Inky Black to Fiery Red” (12), meaning melancholy and intense pride. Ursula likes that she is taller than her mother and most boys at school but hates being compared to her younger and more effeminate sister Lisa.
During the basketball game Ursula is tripped and injured. Nearly overwhelmed by embarrassment and taken over by an Inky Black mood, she misses two foul shots and loses the game.
Chapter 3 Summary
Ursula asserts that there are two types of facts: “Boring, and Crucial” (18). The test of a crucial fact is its painfulness.
Ursula runs from the gym, limping and shouting at Ms. Schultz, “I didn’t screw up on purpose. But if you want to think I did, Ms. Schultz, think it!” (18). Ursula cries in the changing room shower, believing Ms. Schultz will be angry with her. She also assumes her teammates are disappointed at the failure of their captain. Ursula isn’t close to any of her teammates except Bonnie LeMoyne, whom she considers a “sort of” friend (20).
Ursula feels relieved her family did not come to the game. Her father, a globetrotting CEO based in Manhattan and the boss of several Rocky River parents, never comes to watch her play. He always finds time for Lisa’s ballet recitals, however. Ursula reflects, “Did I blame my dad? No. I knew there was nothing in my life of genuine interest or importance. I was a Boring Fact” (21).
On her way out of the changing room, Ursula is called over by a group of students. They are talking wildly about an unknown boy who was taken away by the police due to the rumors he planned to set off a bomb in the school.
The boy is Matt Donaghy. Though Ursula and Matt are not close, she’s known him since the fifth grade and had formed the “impression [that] he had lots of friends, and girls liked him” (26). When the group claims Matt threatened to blow up the school in the cafeteria, Ursula insists that this is not true, claiming she knows the facts because she was there. She immediately stalks away.
Chapter 4 Summary
Matt is in the hall with the police. Though they insist he knows why they’re there, Matt remains oblivious, asking if something happened to his mother. Piqued, the police return the question: Has something happened at home? Terrified, Matt faints.
Chapter 5 Summary
Rumors spread that Matt was led from the school in handcuffs. He is not arrested but is questioned in the principal’s office, where the police tell Matt there were two anonymous witnesses to his statement he planned to “blow up the school” (33). Matt denies this vehemently. Then, taken by the theatrical nature of the situation, Matt erupts, “And if I had, I wouldn’t tell you, about it, would I?” (34).
Matt immediately realizes this was a mistake: He “had been thinking of it as a kind of TV sitcom in which he was the star, he’d have all the good lines (if he could only think of them), but it wasn’t like that at all. The others, the adults, had the script; and he was floundering” (36).
The police ask to inspect Matt’s locker. Again lost in the drama, Matt jeers, “If you’re expecting to find guns and bombs, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to put them in my locker, would I?” (38). Finding nothing in Matt’s locker, the police take him to the station, where he is met by his mother and an attorney. Matt insists on his innocence and asks about the identity of the witnesses, which the police do not divulge.
Matt now remembers privately that he had joked with his friends about blowing up the school if his play was not selected for the Spring Arts Festival. He had jumped on the table while his friend Skeet yelled, “Like Columbine! Viva Columbine!” (43). Matt realizes he made this joke to get attention. He admires people who don’t need attention from others, like “Ursula Riggs. A star girl athlete. Didn’t seem to give a damn whether she was ‘well liked’ or not. Matt was different. He needed to be special. […] A guy with a big mouth and a microphone” (44).
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The first five chapters of Big Mouth & Ugly Girl cover the inciting incident of the novel and introduce us to the two protagonists, Matt the Big Mouth and Ursula the Ugly Girl.
The inciting incident is the narrative event that causes the domino effect of all the following plot points. In this case, it is Matt’s joking performance in the cafeteria that he will “blow up the school” if his play is not selected for the Spring Arts Festival. Notably, the reader is not present for this conversation; rather, they experience the moment through Matt’s retrospective memory. The reader is witness only to the consequences of this moment, such as the police interrogating Matt, and the rumors that spread afterward. In this way, author Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates that Matt’s joke is not the focal point of this novel; instead, it is how these events are perceived that is important. In other words, it is not Matt’s foolish yet ultimately insignificant actions that incite the repercussions that echo throughout the novel but the rumors that spread about his actions. If these chapters have a moral, it is that spreading rumors about people has serious consequences.
Big Mouth & Ugly Girl was written after some very high-profile school shootings in the United States. Oates purposefully draws attention to these events by having the supporting character Skeet shout “Viva Columbine” (43) as Matt jumps on the cafeteria table and pretends to shoot down his classmates. On one level, Oates suggests that Skeet and Matt act very immaturely and do not handle the tragic events of the Columbine shootings with the tact they deserve. On another level, however, these chapters suggest it is a teenager’s role to be immature, and it is adults’ inability to properly perceive and respond to their need for guidance that causes so many of the problems in teenagers’ lives. The inability of adults to fully comprehend the realities of adolescents is exemplified by the contrast between Matt’s perspective on why the police are questioning him and the police’s own intentions. Fed on TV and movies, Matt does not understand the severity of his situation or the consequences of his words, and he takes his interrogation as a performance, not a real event. At the same time, the police treat him as they would an adult, not giving him the guidance that he requires to navigate the situation.
These chapters, like the rest of the book, alternate in narrative focalization between Matt and Ursula. These characters are both protagonists; Matt’s perspective is shared through third-person narration, while Ursula relates her experience in first person. The use of alternating narrators helps Oates indicate that Matt and Ursula, who both feel alone throughout the novel, are in many cases living parallel lives—lives that become increasingly intertwined as the novel goes on. By exposing the reader to each character’s interior thoughts, this alternating narration helps establish Matt and Ursula as foils, or characters who embody contrasting traits. Ursula, who struggles with self-esteem, perceives Matt as someone who is confident and has “lots of friends” (26). Meanwhile, Matt is desperate for his peers’ recognition and validation; he admires Ursula for embodying the traits he lacks, considering her a “star girl athlete” who doesn’t “give a damn whether she was ‘well liked’ or not” (44).
This narration technique also informs inform the reader of a character trait shared between the two protagonists: Both Matt and Ursula are social performers who use their masks—Big Mouth and Ugly Girl—to show the world a version of themselves that is different than who they truly are. In the case of Matt, his Big Mouth is a purposefully extroverted performance that he uses to draw attention to himself as a way of being liked. For Ursula, Ugly Girl is a defensive performance, a tough exterior that covers her insecurity about her body. Throughout the novel these characters will realize the imperfection of their personas by treading closer to their true selves and learning to exist without hiding behind performative masks. In coming to Matt’s defense, Ursula realizes her courage and extroversion. In his excommunication from much of school life, Matt realizes his feelings of solitude and isolation.
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