How well do the various characters cope with or react to the disaster? Use these questions to help formulate your response:

• Which characters react most logically and effectively to the emergency?
• Which characters have the worst, least helpful reactions?
• What are the mistakes or character flaws that lead various characters to success or disaster?
• Which characters change the most over the course of the story? Do their changes lead to success or tragedy?

Teaching Suggestion: After noting responses individually, students could work together to create a coordinate plane on a whiteboard. They would then choose a character’s reaction to the mist—say, “Upset woman runs into the parking lot”—and write it on a post-it note. The x-axis would rate the character’s reaction from most irrational (on the extreme left) to most rational (on the extreme right). They could then consider the y-axis, which would rank the outcome from most successful (at the top) to most tragic (at the bottom). In the case of “Upset woman runs into the parking lot,” they would probably rank it somewhere near (-10, -10), both irrational and tragic.