44 pages • 1 hour read
Ottessa MoshfeghMy Year of Rest and Relaxation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Existential Loneliness and Its Impact on the Psyche
Throughout the novel, the narrator suffers from a loneliness so severe it drives her to risky coping methods. Though she lives a life of privilege—she is wealthy, beautiful, and Ivy League-educated—the narrator lives a profoundly isolated life. Paradoxically despite her loneliness, however, the narrator is loath to form relationships. A self-described misanthrope, she has no interest in connecting to the world around her. At 26, she has no family, no romantic partners, and only one friend, whom she finds insufferably annoying.
A cynical person at her core, the narrator views modern life standards—going to college, climbing the career ladder, finding love, and starting a family, etc.—as pointless. With no ambitions to strive toward or hobbies to take pleasure in, the narrator spends her waking hours being miserable, hating “everyone and everything” and wanting only to go back to sleep (17).
The narrator maintains that she was never truly loved by her parents, and this lack of familial tenderness and affection has a profoundly negative impact on her view of people and relationships. Asserting at one point that her family did not have “much warmth in our hearts” (49), the narrator carries this lovelessness from childhood into adulthood where she is now indifferent to genuine human connection; if her own parents did not have the capacity to love her, then perhaps no one will.
The narrator’s genuine distaste for humanity and general avoidance does more than isolate her from society; her refusal to engage with life (i.e., to pursue a career, hobby, or relationships) keeps her from making any kind of meaningful progress. With virtually no ambitions in life, the narrator often finds herself “just trying to pass the time” (35). At first, she believes that by upholding certain social expectations, such as having a job or carefully tending to her physical appearance, “[…] I could starve off the part of me that hated everything” (35). When her ennui surpasses her desire to keep up those pretenses, she withdraws completely.
Halfway through her year of rest and relaxation, the narrator is no longer desperate to quell her own thoughts, largely because her isolation and drug use has made her emotionally numb. She realizes this while attending Reva’s mother’s funeral, where she “could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me” (137).
In January, the narrator makes a drastic change to her sleep program after Reva steals her pill stash; she knows that if she is to find relief, more extreme measures will be necessary. In late spring, when she falls asleep with the help of Infermiterol for the last time, the narrator feels the weight of the loneliness she has felt her entire life pulling her back down, “somewhere with no horizon, an area of space that awed me in its foreverness” (275). What pulls her out of the hole of loneliness is someone or something else: “maybe it was Ping Xi, maybe it was a wakefulness outside myself” (275). That mysterious being steadies the narrator, giving her the strength to emerge from her slumber ready to let go of her past and begin her life anew.
Hibernation as Rebirth
When the narrator is 26 years old—“plagued with misery, anxiety, and a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body” (18)—she embarks on a mission to sleep for an entire year, convinced that the only way to free herself from her past and start her life anew is to devote herself to resting. Rather than seek therapeutic treatment, the narrator seeks escape.
The narrator has always loved sleep. For her, “nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness” (46). Although the narrator was never close to her mother, sleep was the one activity they enjoyed sharing when she was a child. During a period of conflict between her parents that resulted in them sleeping separately, the narrator and her mother would sleep in the same bed instead. The narrator would often show up late to school or skip it in favor of lounging around with her mother, and given how distant and cold her mother always was, the narrator looks back on this time fondly, as it was the one period in which they bonded as mother and daughter.
By her mid-twenties, the narrator is wandering aimlessly through life—lonely, cynical, and hardened by trauma. She approaches a psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, for sleeping pills in the hopes that they will “drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything” (17). She soon begins to rely heavily on the drugs to get her through life, and even though the project holds no suicidal intention, she is aware that misuse of the prescriptions could be fatal. However, steadfast in her belief that adequate rest will transform her emotionally and spiritually, the narrator is willing to risk death.
When the narrator devises a stricter regime that will allow her to essentially sleep through six months straight, she rids herself of all her earthly possessions. Nearly every belonging is thrown out or given away, the narrator wanting to awake from hibernation with “a completely blank canvas” (258). The act of disposing of all her material goods, regardless of any sentimental value, reflects the narrator’s belief in hibernation as rebirth.
When the narrator emerges from her hibernation, refreshed and with a newfound appreciation for life, she refurnishes her apartment with furniture and trinkets she finds at Goodwill, discovering that “I liked looking at things other people had let go of” (279). Having let go of her own past, the narrator begins interacting with the world, feeding animals at the park, strolling around the city, and taking pleasure in the small details of daily life. By the end of the novel, the narrator knows that her sleep has worked, and the narrative offers many hints that a genuine transformation is underway.
The Human Desire for Love and Affection
A self-described misanthrope, the narrator spends nearly all her time alone. At the beginning of the novel, she roams aimlessly through life, passing the time until she can get back to her favorite activity, sleeping. Her isolation from the world to sleep for abnormal durations blazons her avoidant tendencies, but her distaste for and distrust of others stems from a life history void of genuine love and affection.
Throughout her childhood and even into her adulthood, the narrator felt utterly unloved by her parents. While she grew up, the narrator’s parents took no interest in their daughter, barely acknowledging her existence and passing by her in the halls like strangers. When they did give her attention, it was in the form of judgment, such as when her mother was disgusted by the narrator’s teenage acne. As an adult, the narrator has only a few memories of when her mother “could make me feel very special, stroking my hair, her perfume light and sweet […]” (64). However, these moments of motherly affection were short-lived, as “the next moment she’d be in a haze, distracted, suffering from some grave fear or worry and struggling to put up with even the thought of me” (64).
The narrator’s fitful relationship with her first and only boyfriend, Trevor, is similarly loveless. Though the narrator claims to have loved him when they were together, this purported love is never reciprocated. Fifteen years her senior, Trevor is passionless and cold, returning to the narrator only in moments when he has been rejected by women his own age.
In the second half of the novel, when the narrator endures a period of restlessness, she hounds Trevor over the phone, threatening to kill herself if he does not cheat on his girlfriend and have sex with her. Her insomnia during this time awakens her deepest anxieties; without the escape of sleep, she is forced to reckon with the fact that like most people, she desires love and affection. When she calls Trevor, completely sober, and admits she only wants to hear that he misses her, she betrays this innate desire, which only sleep can hold at bay.
The one source of genuine love and affection for the narrator is her best friend Reva, whom she disdains. Reva constantly checks up on the narrator throughout her hibernation and never fails to express her love for her. However, because the narrator finds Reva shallow and fake, she never fully appreciates Reva’s love. It is only after emerging from her Infermiterol-induced hibernation that she can appreciate Reva, “with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears” (283). It is only once the narrator has found healing that she can not only appreciate Reva’s love but also reciprocate it. She tells Reva, “I love you” (283), with sincerity the last time they see each other in person.
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