NOTE: Full spoilers for the book contained below.
Essie lay there for a while reading her book. She had to stop every few minutes to refocus herself and re-read half a page, pushing off red thoughts of Leonard’s inconsiderate behavior. He could be a real bastardo sometimes.
I think Essie is rather justified in her irritation at Leonard. He’s inconsiderate when he gets flustered, and she although he always apologies afterward and they make up, it’s tough to look forward to that in the midst of being mistreated.
[Cherry] stood up and waved for Essie to stop. She dug through her purse and produced a bottle of pills.
. . .
Essie popped a pill dry–she’d gotten good at that over the years–and then returned the bottle.
The way things are going, I keep wondering if anything the characters ate or drank was drugged in some way. In this case, I suspect not; I think that Cherry is a genuinely good person caught up in something horrific, and in this chapter she’s struggling to reconcile her good-heartedness with what she’s being asked to do in spreading the message she knows is hurting people.
I suppose Cherry’s last name, Romero, is a reference to the director of Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, although I’ve never actually seen that one so…does it really count?
(Maxine:) “One thing you learn as you age is that you never really overcome your flaws. Your…problems. They aren’t just passing illnesses. They stick in you, like thorns. If you pick at them, they only get deeper. The only thing you can do is learn how to live with them. Don’t brush them against anything. Take whatever you need to take to dull the pain.
“That’s what Mom and Dad don’t get. Dad especially. He never got over his wife and kid dying—he just tried to bury it.”
This is, perhaps, Maxine’s motivation in a nutshell. I left vague the specifics of the events that led to her developing this worldview. With the exception of knowing that her mother’s death shook her, we don’t know what exactly these “flaws” and “problems” are that she is so bitter about.
Personally, I think she’s a little more unsettling that way. She’s so closed off that she won’t even try to help you understand her way of thinking.
Why did she become the person she is now? She had unfulfilled expectations for life, went through hard things, and let that make her bitter. It gave her a thirst for relief and recompense so intense that she would “take whatever she needed”–including swallowing a degenerate and evil ideology–“to dull the pain.”
Classroom 120 was enormous, looking more like an auditorium than any other classroom Julia had ever entered.
. . .
The slides began to switch more rapidly. Each showed photos highlighting excerpts from books. Certain specific words were in red, while general statements surrounding them were in yellow.
Simultaneously the crowd of students erupted in rage, shouting and clamoring almost indecipherably. Julia’s jaw fell further, and she froze.
This whole scene is inspired by the Two Minutes’ Hate in George Orwell’s 1984.
It was intended to be the first truly unsettling scene in the book, the moment where we understand that something is going hugely wrong here, even if we don’t really understand what it is. Julia is unfortunate enough to be thrown into the fire.
Maxine didn’t necessarily expect that the class would get to that level of furor. She’s so absorbed in her own way of thinking that she wasn’t wary enough of the potential consequences taking Julia along could bring. I suspect that most of the classes wouldn’t be quite so extreme, at least not that early in the semester.
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