Scorpion

The Scorpion is both a missed answer and a subject the narrator later comes to know exceptionally well. In a family quiz about dangerous desert animals, he cannot recall its name and repeatedly answers crab instead. The gap between what he knows and what he can say becomes painful; the episode ends with the first bodily sign of the loss of control that will lead into his characteristic rage.

The Quiz and the Missing Name

During the quiz, the question asks for a highly venomous desert creature other than a snake. The narrator has made the desert his specialty, but under his family’s expectant attention his mind goes blank. He pictures the animal without being able to name it and calls out crab, then repeats the same wrong answer after his mother hints that the creature is also a zodiac sign. His brothers mock the mistake, pointing out that crabs live in the sea, while his mother continues to gesture with her hands like snapping pincers.

The narrator eventually tries spider, and his brothers use the zodiac hint to joke that one of them is a spider. When the guessing time ends, his father supplies the answer: Scorpion. He gives the narrator a point anyway, reasoning that a scorpion resembles a crab, but the brothers protest that the answer was wrong and that the mother’s gestures amounted to help. Their dispute over the point turns the quiz from a test of knowledge into a public argument about whether the narrator deserves credit.

From Embarrassment to Rage

The failure matters less as a measure of what the narrator knows than as an experience of being unable to retrieve it while everyone watches. He describes the not-knowing as painful and empty. His brothers’ continued teasing, including their recollection of other supposedly foolish quiz answers, pushes the scene toward a change in mood: his scalp begins to itch, which the narrator identifies as an early warning of impending loss of control and a sign that he is heading into the dead end of rage.

The Scorpion therefore enters the narrative through a mismatch: the narrator’s specialty is the desert, yet in the pressure of the game he cannot produce the name of one of its most familiar creatures. The family’s competing judgments—his father’s indulgent point and his brothers’ insistence on zero—make that lapse socially charged. The episode connects an ordinary game to the narrator’s recurring difficulty with anger without suggesting that the wrong answer itself explains or excuses the outburst that threatens to follow.

A Creature Becomes Part of His Expertise

Later, the narrator’s father gives him a specialist magazine about the desert, titled Die Wüste. The narrator reads it while his father studies books and magazines of his own, and the publication gives the boy knowledge beyond what would ordinarily be expected of a child. By then, he knows scorpions exceptionally well and can distinguish dozens of species.

That expertise also spills into his schoolwork. Teachers repeatedly ask him to write about the assigned topic rather than the desert, but even an essay about children in traffic becomes a route back to the lives of Bedouin children and their long journeys to school. The Scorpion thus belongs to a wider pattern: the desert is not just a quiz category for the narrator but an absorbing field of knowledge that keeps drawing his attention, even when the setting or assignment points elsewhere.