Analyze Todd’s use of dramatic irony in the chapters set in Berlin. Select several moments in which the reader’s historical knowledge differs from what the characters know or believe at the time. How does this gap between reader and character shape the novel’s portrayal of uncertainty?

Examine the role of setting in The Lilac People. Compare two or more significant spaces, such as the Eldorado, the Institut, the Baumann farm, Oberer Kuhberg, the ferry or ship, and New York. How do these physical environments shape characterization, conflict, or meaning?

Conduct further research on the Allied enforcement of Paragraph 175 after WWII. How does this historical context illuminate the novel’s central conflict and challenge traditional narratives of liberation?

Characters in The Lilac People frequently rely on performance and deception to survive. What does the novel suggest about the relationship between performing an identity for safety and preserving one’s authentic self? Use at least three examples to support your position.

Analyze the use of parallelism, repetition, or narrative echoes between the novel’s earlier and later timelines. Identify a pattern of repeated situations, images, actions, or language and develop an argument about how its meaning changes through repetition.

Analyze the role of irony in the novel’s depiction of liberation. Consider moments in which expectations of freedom, safety, justice, or rescue conflict with what characters actually experience. Identify and discuss one theme that is revealed through these reversals.

If you have read Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939), compare its depiction of queer life in the Weimar Republic to that in The Lilac People. What does Todd’s focus on the transmasculine experience reveal or problematize?

Compare The Lilac People to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), if you have read it. Both novels depart from straightforward chronological storytelling while placing personal lives within historical catastrophe. Analyze how each author uses narrative structure and chronology to shape the reader’s experience of trauma, memory, and history.