Dinner scenes in novels hold a lot of meaning to the overall plot of the story. An author only uses a dinner scene to evoke or display another aspect of the characters and/or plot scheme. In The Devils Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen, Hannah (the main character) shows her aggravation with celebrating Passover, a Jewish holiday, with her grandparents. In the dinner scene, she opens the door for Elijah, a referenced prophet in Judaism, and is transported back to the time period of the Holocaust. During her stay in the year of 1942, Hannah goes through trials and tribulations, as she is imprisoned in a concentration camp. The final climax of the story is when Hannah is sent to Lilith’s Cave to be placed in a gas chamber and ends up back in her grandparents’
