84 pages • 2 hours read
Alexandra BrackenThe Darkest Minds
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Fear and Betrayal of the Young
In The Darkest Minds, generational conflict has gone far beyond older people complaining about kids these days. Bracken depicts a dystopian society where adults are so afraid of the potential power of young people that they have placed them in internment camps (or even targeted them for death). While it is true that the children left alive in the world in the novel do have dangerous powers, the novel also shows how quickly older Americans turn on younger generations when they prove a threat or inconvenient to them. Older generations, the novel suggests, can be profoundly unfair and cruel to the young. This is true even of members of some young characters’ own families; Zu and Jack, for example, were betrayed by parents who feared them. For young readers who may worry that older generations do not care about them or the world they grow up in, Bracken provides a fictional dystopian setting that ramps up this anxiety to an extreme.
The clearest example of how the young are mistreated is the Psi camps themselves, where young people are kept from their families, prevented from being educated, and detained with threat of violence. At Thurmond, where Ruby is kept, inmates are punished and threatened with Calm Control, a sound broadcast over speakers at a painful frequency that only Psi kids can hear. The camps are a clear human rights violation, yet, as Chubs points out to Ruby, very few adults in the society show as much concern for what happens there as they do for national economic troubles: “[S]omething you’ll learn pretty fast is that we’re not exactly a priority to anyone right now. Everyone’s more focused on the fact that the country is broke as a joke” (212).
Even outside of the camps there are signs that this is a society that has turned its back on the young. One detail consistent through the novel is that the radio stations play only classic rock, no new popular music. At one point, a radio deejay plays the song “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan, and then immediately apologizes, saying it is on the “no-play list,” implying that even music referencing being young is forbidden in this society (301). Another example is the empty college campus, when the Black Betty travelers drive through James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ruby finds it depressing when Chubs tells her that everyone who is college age either is drafted or can’t afford college tuition any more anyway (223). This detail, that college has become inaccessible to the point of becoming obsolete, resonates with real-life concerns about the rising costs of college tuition, and underlines Bracken’s theme that older generations lack empathy for the young.
Ruby and the other young characters seem to want to trust adult authority figures and experience their apathy and hostility as painful. Cate, even at the end of the novel, promises to take care of Ruby, the way an adult is supposed to watch out for a young person, and part of Ruby seems drawn to being cared for in that way. Yet she also comes to believe, like Liam, that “...the only people that were ever going to help us were ourselves” (273). The characters come to rely entirely on other young people.
The Importance of Memory
Being remembered, especially by those who love us, is vitally important in the narrative of The Darkest Minds. This theme is closely tied to the protagonist’s biggest fear throughout the novel: that she will accidentally erase herself from the memory of someone she cares about. Ruby is traumatized by the experience of having inadvertently wiped her parents’ minds the night before her 10th birthday (as well as the similar, later experience of affecting her best friend Sam’s memory).
Bracken’s extended description in Chapter 19 of how Ruby discovers her parents no longer remember her emphasizes the horror and pathos of the situation. Ruby wakes up on the morning of her birthday, expecting birthday pancakes and presents, but instead finds parents who don’t recognize her. Not being remembered by her loved ones means losing her entire identity and sense of self. This makes her decision at the end to take herself out of Liam’s memories in order to protect him all the more poignant.
On the other hand, the novel also depicts those who are motivated by taking memory seriously, by the act of memorializing those we miss and love. For the characters on the run from Caledonia—especially Liam and Chubs—the letter that Jack wrote to his father before they broke out of the camp becomes an important symbol of his memory. Taking the letter to Jack’s father is a way of remembering and honoring him. When Chubs is angry at Liam in Chapter 24, one key accusation he makes against him is that it is “easy to forget” about the kids who followed Liam at Caledonia when he is making friends at East River (403). The insult works because to Chubs and Liam, forgetting kids who were by their side and have died is unforgivable.
Another serious expression of memory is seen in Chapter 13, when the characters drive by an overwhelming wall of missing posters in Harrisonburg decorated by “stuffed animals and flowers and blankets and ribbons” (224). Ruby is moved because this wall represents families who do remember their children and badly want them back.
One other way that the importance of memory is addressed in the novel is an emphasis that our memories are personal to us, something that we ought to have ownership over. Liam brings this up in Chapter 20 when he tries to explain to Ruby why he is hesitant to talk about his family with her: “Those things—those memories—are mine, you know? They’re the things that the camp didn’t take away when I went in, and they’re the things I don’t have to share if I don’t want to” (315). Later, Clancy seems to understand the idea that you don’t want to share all memories, and he relates that he had a childhood tutor, Benjamin, whose death he finds too painful to talk about (381). Yet Clancy also violates boundaries when it comes to viewing Ruby’s memories, and his lack of respect for what she is comfortable sharing is an aspect of his manipulation.
One personal association Ruby has with Cate is the smell of rosemary, which she also associates with her mother’s face cream the night she erases her memory. This may be an allusion to Ophelia’s line connecting rosemary and memory from Act IV, Scene V of Hamlet: “There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”
Choosing Your Own Home and Community
Another important theme in the novel is the concept that your home, and your community, should be a matter of your own choice; the circumstances you happen to find yourself in are not your destiny. When Liam refers to Ruby as being from Virginia, she begins to think about the idea of being from a place. Ruby describes fearing that Thurmond has become the place she was really from, through the simple fact she lived there for so long. She questions how it works to have a home: “If I got to choose it, or if it had somehow already claimed me” (221). Ruby knows that being from a place that treated you like you are less than human—such as the Psi internment camps—can damage you as an individual. Yet the narrative demonstrates and affirms the young characters’ abilities to establish their own more loving and supportive homes and families with one another instead.
The clearest symbol of a chosen home and community in the narrative is Black Betty, the beat-up minivan that Liam, Chubs and Zu have been traveling in. Black Betty is a physical home that offers the young people some protection in a dangerous world, as well as a place to eat, sleep, have conversations, and store belongings. Liam refers to Black Betty playfully and affectionately using feminine pronouns, and when they have to abandon the car later for fear of being identified, the characters experience real mourning, expressing their sadness by putting flowers on her windshield. Ruby reflects that “this had been a safe place for them. For us” (318). The Black Betty community also is the family of young people traveling inside her: Liam, Chubs and Zu at first, and then Ruby. These four characters choose to be loyal to one another in ways that are similar to family bonds, and they feel responsible for one another.
After the loss of Black Betty, the characters become part of another community, East River, which at first seems like another example of a place characters have intentionally chosen to make into a home. A campground run by Psi kids for Psi kids, one of the residents of East River tells them that “every day here feels like Christmas” (329). Yet later, we discover that Clancy Gray keeps tight control over who can leave East River. Even more ominously, using his Orange abilities, he manipulates the residents’ perceptions of living there, so that it’s not clear how much they have been truly able to choose their own loyalties. Living in Black Betty was about young people choosing commitment to each other on their own. Living in East River, it is implied, is having that choice subtly taken away, too much like the camps.
Sometimes, Bracken suggests that these chosen ties between characters are as important as family ties. When Zu decides to leave East River with her cousin to find her aunt and uncle in California, the members of her Black Betty community struggle to handle the loss. When Ruby says that Zu should be with her family, Liam rejects that logic, saying instead, “She should be with us” (401). For Liam, the ties between the Black Betty travelers are more important than the ties between family by blood.
