48 pages • 1 hour read
Jeff KinneyDouble Down
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Double Down is the 11th book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. The books have been published at a rate of roughly one book per year since 2007. They are aimed at a middle-grade audience and are consistent in tone and structure. Greg Heffley is the protagonist of all of the books, though there are also spinoffs from Rowley Jefferson’s perspective. Although the books ostensibly take place over the course of several school years, their actual chronology is unclear as Greg is always in middle school and does not seem to change or age in obvious ways. There is continuity among the books despite Greg’s static nature: Double Down briefly references the Cheese Touch, a plot point from the original Diary of a Wimpy Kid novel. It also includes the family’s pig, which only joins the story’s canon in The Long Haul, the series’s ninth book.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an extraordinarily successful series. In fact, it has been outsold by only three other book series: J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books (which are the inspiration for the Spineticklers stories in Double Down), and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels. Cumulatively, the Wimpy Kid books and their spinoffs have sold over 275 million copies. There have been five Wimpy Kid film adaptations, starting with Diary of a Wimpy Kid in 2011. Author Jeff Kinney started working on the story in the 1990s, originally publishing short comics online. He has said Greg and his misadventures are based to some extent on Kinney’s own memories of adolescence, but the books are not autobiographical.
Genre Context: Graphic Novels
A graphic novel is a story told through a combination of text and images. While graphic novels can be aimed at any audience, they are commonly aimed at younger readers. The specific combination of text and images can vary from comic books where the whole story is conveyed through comic strips and dialogue, to books primarily written in prose that also feature illustrations. Double Down falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Most of the story is told through text, but there are cartoon illustrations on almost every page. Sometimes, those illustrations provide context that is not given in the text itself. For example, in one scene, the text says, “what happened NEXT is the reason I haven’t been in the furnace room ever since” (52). The illustration shows Greg and his father standing in the kitchen and grimacing fearfully as they hear a frightening Halloween decoration make cackling noises from the basement. The decoration’s batteries are sitting on the kitchen counter in front of them.
There are many other notable graphic novels that may be of interest to younger readers. The Bone series by Jeff Smith utilizes a comic strip format to tell dark, fantasy stories. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick is a historical fiction novel written mostly in prose, but certain passages of the book are told exclusively through detailed illustrations. Smile by Raina Telgemeier is another book about a young protagonist navigating the challenges of middle school, which is followed by several sequels. Graphic novels are accessible, fun books for kids and teens who are not otherwise enthusiastic about reading.
Literary Context: Unreliable Narrators
A narrator is a story’s voice—the lens through which the story is told. Greg Heffley is the first-person narrator of Double Down, telling the story from his own perspective. Readers typically assume that narrators are reliable, meaning that they are telling their story truthfully. After all, narrators are usually the only sources of information available to readers trying to understand the plot. Unreliable narrators are either mistaken about events, missing important information, or deliberately lying to readers, and can lend a sense of intrigue to a story as readers start to wonder what they are hiding and why. There are many ways to spot unreliable narrators in different texts. Sometimes, a story will be narrated by two or more characters whose versions of events do not match up. Other times, narrators might make a claim that they later contradict. Readers might doubt a narrator’s version of events if those events seem particularly implausible, if they make the narrator seem flawless, or if they do not make sense.
Although Greg’s narration is earnest, it is not necessarily honest or reliable. Greg’s mother talks about his past deceptions, and sometimes people in Greg’s life do not believe his stories. Because Double Down is Greg’s diary, it describes events as Greg would like to remember them. Some of the stories he tells sound implausible. For instance, after Rowley appears on the news for getting stuck in a tree, Greg says that “every morning talk show” wants to interview him (216, which is unlikely to be the truth. It’s more plausible that Greg is exaggerating because he is jealous of the attention that Rowley is getting. In Greg’s case, his unreliability contributes to his characterization as a pre-teen boy learning to define himself and find his way in the world.
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