Dust

“The gods I believe in…the gods I worship were the men and women who built this place and more like it. They built this place to protect us from the world they destroyed. They were gods and demons, both. But they left us space for redemption. They meant us to be free, Father, and they gave us the means.”

Juliette’s view of the world has gone from black and white to gray with experience and knowledge of the truth. Her understanding that the people of the past were both “gods and demons” emphasizes that their power had no moral quality until it was used for the terrible purpose of nuclear war and the more benign purpose of saving some human life. She refuses to label things as good or evil exclusively, unlike Father Wendel.

“He was dying, which is why he wanted to stockpile food for her and make sure she could leave. It was why he wanted to make sure she had a radio, so she would have someone to talk to. Her brother was dying, and he didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to die down there in that pit in the ground where he couldn’t breathe. Charlotte knew damn well what the suit was for.”

This passage uses repetition to emphasize Donald’s resolve and Charlotte’s understanding of her brother’s fears and mindset. Donald is ensuring that Charlotte will have the necessities for survival without consideration for his own life. Interestingly, though, Donald’s motivations are contradictory: He pursues death but fears burial; he accepts death but not what could come after.

“‘[The books] are there so that whoever inherits the world—whoever is chosen—will know…’ ‘Know what?’ Lukas asked desperately. He feared he was going to lose him. Donald had trod near to this in prior conversations, but had always pulled away. ‘To know how to set things right,’ Donald said.”

The motif of books (See: Symbols & Motifs) recurs throughout to emphasize the forgotten past and the power that past holds. Donald has power over Lukas because he understands the way things were. Lukas is desperate for knowledge but requires Donald’s mediation to receive it. Even so, Donald is continually vague, holding back understanding from Lukas out of fear.

“I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”

The relativity of time here juxtaposes the lived experience of those in subordinate silos to that of the inhabitants of Silo 1. While Lukas and the others in the secondary silos have a human understanding of life spans, the people in Silo 1 have lived for hundreds of years due to the cryofreeze technology. At the same time, Lukas’s statement points out the cyclical nature of both kinds of lives. For Lukas and the men in Silo 1, a hundred years does not change their experience of the world, whether alive or dead.

“[Juliette] saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot. And the stains would never wash out. That’s what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar.”

This passage interrogates fatalism, or the inevitability of human actions and behavior. Once an action has been performed, it cannot be undone, but Lukas and Juliette both emphasize that the future is yet undecided. Thus, only the past is fated and determined; there is no inevitability to human actions yet to come. The silos were not inevitable; Juliette’s escape was not inevitable—they are events that could take place in a potential timeline, which Lukas terms “immortal tense” to distinguish it from the present, past, and future.

“[Charlotte] wiggled back under the drone and tried to imagine a time when people were born into their jobs, when they had no choice. First sons did what their fathers did. Second sons went to war, to the sea, or to the Church. Any boy who followed was left on his own. Daughters went to the sons of others.”

Since she comes from pre-silo Earth, Charlotte’s perspective on history has been shaped by the sexism and classism of her past, a reality that is unimaginable for people born in the silos. At the same time, the lack of choice in Silo 1—even compared to the other silos—makes her reflection ironic. Just as past women’s identities revolved around the men in their lives, women in Silo 1 sleep as motivational objects to the waking men, frozen until an imagined future where men can reclaim them. History, therefore, is more cyclical than Charlotte fully realizes.

“Donald saw that now. He saw it awake—panting, coughing, sweating—as well as in his dreams. He remembered thinking that the women had been set aside so that there would be nothing to fight over. But the opposite was true. They were there to give the rest of them something to fight for. Someone to save. It was for them that men worked these dark shifts, slept through these dark nights, dreaming of what would never be.”

Despite the silo plan being put into place in the 2050s, sexism and gender division still control the system. The men are seen as the actors, while the women—other than Anna and eventually Charlotte—are passive. Heterosexuality is the assumed norm in the silos of the present; it is assumed across the board that the men will fight for the women and that the women will have little agency in their own role in the future.

“Donald coughed, and thought of all the hero sagas of old, of men and women struggling for righteousness, always with a happy ending, always against impossible odds, always bullshit. Heroes didn’t win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story—the dead didn’t say a word. All of it was bullshit.”

This passage emphasizes that history is inherently relative and asks readers to consider the book’s premises. Juliette is arguably the protagonist, but is she a hero? Is the ending truly a victory or just a neutral event in the long span of human history? By establishing a dichotomy between story and history, this passage argues that by chronicling “whoever happen[s] to win,” the book is eliding wishful thinking and truthful recounting of events.

“Panic surged through Juliette. Shutting them down. The threats of ending them with the push of a button. Ending them.”

The silos are a gruesomely ironic recapitulation of the very fate Thurman ostensibly wanted to save some humans from. Driven by hubris and hypocrisy, Thurman created the silos to prevent some people from dying in the nuclear war he unleashed—a theoretical silver lining to the genocide he is responsible for. However, he still maintains the power to press a button and obliterate entire populations, one silo at a time. Human life has no value except when it cooperates with the plan; Thurman sees Silo 18 as numbers, while Juliette sees them as a community.

“Juliette wept and slapped the floor and screamed at [Lukas]. She cursed him. She cursed herself. And through the open door of the digger, a cloud of dust billowed in on a cool breeze, and Juliette could taste it on her tongue, on her lips. It was the dry chalk of crushed rock, the remnants of Shirly’s blast far down the tunnel, the taste of everything she had ever known…dead.”

When Juliette loses Lukas, Shirly, and thousands of others in the destruction of Silo 18, she is wracked by grief and guilt at the desolation that was caused in minutes by Silo 1 through her actions. Here, the “cool breeze” that offers no reprieve or freshness, but instead brings the taste of death, has a hint of foreshadowing. Although Silo 18 has just experienced unimaginable loss, Shirly’s sacrifice ensures they will eventually escape to a better future.

“Charlotte used to enjoy putting on makeup. That seemed like a different lifetime, a different person. She remembered moving from playing video games to trying to be pretty, shading her cheeks so they didn’t look so chubby.”

In this scene, Charlotte is attempting to disguise herself as a man to infiltrate the rest of the silo. Beauty standards and gender roles still affect how she thinks, even if they do not currently impact her day-to-day life. These specific beauty standards, however, rarely show up in the other silos, emphasizing Charlotte’s connection to a lost past.

“She refrained from adding that they were all dead anyway. They were walking corpses in that shell of a silo, that home for madness and rust. But she knew she sounded just as mad as everyone else had, cautioning against digging because the air over here was supposed to be poison. Now they wanted to tunnel to their death as badly as she had wanted to tunnel to hers.”

In the second half of the book, the fates of Silos 18 and 17 cause Juliette to change her perspective completely. The language in this passage demonstrates her despair; whereas Silo 17 had once offered hope, now she believes it is a curse. Misguided as they may be, the inhabitants attempting to dig their way back to the destroyed Silo 18 they came from have more hope than she does, but only because they do not know the full truth of their situation.

“We shouldn’t go after these people for what they did. No. We should go after them for what they’re capable of doing. Before they do it again.”

Although Juliette spends much of this chapter blaming herself, her conclusion emphasizes what makes her a good leader and protagonist—her genuine altruism and concern for even those she does not know. While Juliette sees herself as hardened, she genuinely cares about her people. This, however, sets her against her companions, who have narrower lenses and balance her optimism with their pragmatic concerns.

“Elise didn’t have a poisoned pill in her flesh. Not yet. Hannah said they grew in there late like grown-up teeth, which was why it was important to have babies as early as you could. Rickson said this weren’t true at all, and that if you were born without a pill in your hip you’d never have one, but Elise didn’t know what to believe.”

The novel explores how language would change in a silo existence. Hannah, still a child, has adopted the phrasing used by the church to describe birth control devices as “poison”—schooled to think of herself as primarily useful for procreation, Hannah parrots the reactionary teachings of the priests. Hannah’s ideas presage the danger that will come to Elise from Rash, who will see the seven-year-old as a sexual object, buying into the dogma that the need to survive and procreate should destroy childhood and consent.

“My home, my people, are dead and you would have me hope. I’ve seen the hope you dish out, the bright blue skies we pull down over our heads, the lie that makes the exiled do their bidding, clean for you. I’ve seen it, and thank God I knew how to doubt it. It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?”

Juliette’s speech to Charlotte references events from the first book in the series, where those sentenced to clean were sent out with images of a beautiful outside world projected into their helmets to ensure they stayed out long enough to die and were motivated to clean the outside sensors. Juliette’s speech emphasizes that hope has no meaning without truth to ground it and that despair isn’t real without lived experience of “hell.”

“Now, I know the fix we’re in as well as most. I don’t reckon we’ll get anywhere with this next dig, but it’ll give us something to do until our time comes. Until then, I’m going to wake up sore next to the woman I love, and if I’m lucky I’ll do the same thing the next morning, and every one of those is a gift. This ain’t hell. This is what comes before. And you gave us that.”

Erik reorients Juliette to the value of human life and love. In direct contradiction to the previous passage, he effectively argues that hell is relative; Juliette hasn’t condemned them but instead given them a chance to live another day. By breaking down the black-and-white perspective Juliette has been operating under, Erik gives her the strength to move forward and seek the future despite her grief.

“Their days were counted. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.”

Life is devastatingly temporal in this passage, which emphasizes how little value the silo plan places on individual existence. Hundreds of years have passed for the silos; thousands of people have lived and died under Thurman’s regime without any reason for being other than the human drive to survive.

“Where are the books? It is so important, my daughter. There is only one book, you know. All these others are lies. Now tell me where they are.”

Within the silos, information is withheld by both the church and political leaders to maintain control over the populace. The priest’s aggression toward Elise shows that he is afraid of losing power and will do anything necessary to maintain it. The gradual replacing of history, biology, and other information with the Bible demonstrates that the silos have adopted a quasi-fundamentalist version of Christianity.

“Inside, [Charlotte] felt torn. She had wanted [Darcy] to take her in, but now she wanted to talk more. She had feared him, but now she wanted to trust him. Salvation seemed to come from being arrested, from being put back to sleep, and yet some other salvation seemed to lie within reach.”

This passage uses parallel construction to show Charlotte’s desperation for trust and human connection. Darcy’s presence brings practical and intensely emotional types of hope. After living for so long in isolation and fear, having someone to trust is as necessary for Charlotte as food or water. The two sides of Charlotte are at war here: her desperation for hope and the despair that encourages her to surrender.

“Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.”

This passage’s use of imagery establishes Donald’s conviction that each day has no specific value or point, a point of view that contrasts with the perspective of other characters, who view each day as a unique blessing. To Donald, who is dying, life is something to be endured, not enjoyed. This is a condensed version of what the silos mean for humanity: no future outside of a brutal and slow death.

“But there were other silos, dozens of them, teeming with life and lives. Somewhere, a parent was lecturing a child. A teenager was stealing a kiss. A warm meal was being served. Paper was being recycled into pulp and back into paper; oil was gurgling up and being burned; exhaust was vented into the great and forbidden outside. All of those worlds were humming forward, each of them ignorant of the others.”

This passage argues that what makes life worth living are everyday, commonplace experiences. There is beauty in human connection and commonality, not in their individuality. In many ways, the silos are a microcosm critique of the real world; just as each silo exists independently without thought for the others, so too do people often disregard the needs or suffering of others, especially distant others we do not encounter.

“Juliette hugged the kids and Solo. She hadn’t seen them since her silo fell. They reminded her why she was doing this, what she was fighting for, what was worth fighting for. A rage had built up inside of her, a single-minded pursuit of digging through the earth down below and digging for answers outside. And she had lost sight of this, these things worth saving. She had been too concerned with those who deserved to be damned.”

This passage marks where Juliette lets go of her desire to die via revenge to a desire to live well. She realizes that violence and death are a cycle; rather, she needs to preserve the remaining people she loves. Silo 17 must let go of their imprisonment to survive and move forward.

“I’ve lived my entire life only believing what I can see. I need proof. I need to see results. And even then I need to see them a second and a third time before I get a glimpse of how things truly are. But this is a case where what I know for certain—the life that awaits us here—is not worth living. And there’s a chance that a better one can be found elsewhere.”

Faith and trust are important themes in the novel, often contrasted with the fear and suspicion necessarily to survive. Asking the people in the silo to have blind faith is radical; even the church asks for obedience only. Juliette positions her proposition as a black-and-white dichotomy—either live a pointless life or risk a hopeful death.