51 pages • 1 hour read
Susan Beth PfefferThis World We Live In
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A 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
The Tension Between Responsibility and Independence
While This World We Live In can be categorized as a work of near-future dystopian fiction, it is also a coming-of-age novel, as most works of young adult fiction are. The primary protagonist, Miranda Evans, is 17 years old, and her experiences—like those of the other young people in the book—have forced her to assume the responsibilities of adulthood while she is still an adolescent. At the same time, she remains a teenager raised in the pre-apocalyptic world, with the typical dreams and desires (and self-centeredness) that point to her relative youth. She yearns for solitude and the space to figure out who she ultimately wants to be (hence, the importance of her diaries). She also fears being separated from her family, while at the same time, she fears equally that she will remain trapped in Howell. Her empathy for others, including Mom, expands as her romance with Alex builds. For the first time, Miranda must make difficult and life-altering decisions.
The search for solitude occupies much of Miranda’s time, and the simple pleasure of being alone with her thoughts draws her away from her family. As she writes early in the book, “When you share a room with three people and a cat, anything you can keep secret feels good” (4). This desire to keep secrets speaks to the adolescent Miranda; she is learning how to process information on her own, without an authority figure to explain it to her—and she often gets it wrong. When she admits to Mom that it rained the other night (the secret she was keeping), Mom scolds her for not waking the others to collect the rainwater for washing and cooking. Miranda herself did not think of such practicalities and the greater needs of the family.
Still, Miranda’s feelings of claustrophobia arise naturally from her circumstances: At an age when young people typically begin learning to become their own person and break free of their families, Miranda is stuck very close to home. Mom does not even give Miranda permission to travel through the mostly empty neighborhoods alone. When Miranda accompanies Dad, Alex, and Julie to the convent, she realizes, “I might never get this far from home again” (167). After the convent turns out to be empty and the van breaks down far from home, Miranda’s most significant—and contradictory—fears come to the fore: “I’m frightened I’ll never see home again and almost more frightened that once I get there, I’ll never leave” (177). In this world, leaving home might mean never seeing or speaking to one’s family again. An act as standard as leaving the nest—going away to college or getting one’s first apartment—becomes fraught with danger and irreversible consequences in a post-apocalyptic world.
However, as her romance with Alex blossoms, Miranda begins to think about the possibility (perhaps the inevitability) of leaving home and family. She has begun to show signs of growing maturity: She cares for Mom after Mom faints in the cellar, and she listens to Alex and wants what is best for him, not merely for herself; her selfishness recedes in the face of her developing empathy. She finally understands that this world does not guarantee either happiness or a long life: “Maybe I’ll live five more years, or five more weeks, or only five more days. But I’ve been given the gift of those five weeks, and I shouldn’t be greedy for more,” she writes of her time with Alex (202). It is an unstintingly realistic and unselfish perspective. Though Mom cautions Miranda against making any rash decisions—“You think you’re grown up but you’re not” (206)—Miranda has begun to realize that time is fleeting, especially given the unprecedented circumstances. She responds to Mom, “You have to fight for happiness, Mom. Maybe it didn’t used to be that way, but it is now” (207). Miranda will now take responsibility for her own choices.
Thus, she makes one of the hardest—and most morally fraught—choices of her young life. When Alex has still not returned after the tornado and Julie has been mortally injured, Miranda decides that, according to Alex’s own wishes, she cannot allow Julie to suffer: “Alex was gone. Julie was my responsibility, no one else’s” (229). She kills Julie to prevent her from suffering—an act that would have been unthinkable in her former existence. In the aftermath, after Alex returns, Miranda understands the gravity of her choice. She can only hope that he will forgive her, knowing that she will eventually tell him the truth, but if he does not, she is prepared to let him go. Miranda has come of age in this world where the stakes of such a journey are higher than ever.
Finding Hope Amid Scarcity and Loss
The daily lives of the characters in This World We Live In, and in the Last Survivors series as a whole, are profoundly affected by the loss of security following the global disaster. They live in a world of scarcity after having grown up in a world of abundance, and the search for food occupies much of their time, while the lack of food haunts their thoughts. Food, however, is not the only necessity in increasingly short supply; material goods of all kinds are no longer being produced or distributed, as the global supply chain has been rendered defunct. The consumer culture that defines contemporary life has also been obliterated, as the gravitational pull of the nearer moon makes shipping goods overseas impossible and interferes with manufacturing equipment. Besides the lack of material comforts, the characters are plagued by the psychological difficulties of surviving in this new world. Hope is yet another resource in short supply—though not yet lost.
The omnipresent worry over the availability of food oppresses all the characters’ thoughts, and Miranda records her own fears. Food comes to symbolize both hope and despair. As Miranda writes of her anxiety over the food deliveries, “[I]t would be worse [for the deliveries to end] now, because for a little while we’ve had food, so we’ve had reason to hope” (10). Of course, shortly after she writes this, the deliveries do in fact cease—though the family discovers that food can still be retrieved from City Hall one day a week. Without food, there is only despair and eventually death.
When Dad and his fellow travelers return to Howell, the primary obstacle to welcoming them is the shortage of food. Dad and Miranda resort to deception in order to procure more food, and Miranda is understandably “relieved about the extra food for Lisa” because she is still nursing the baby (111). Lisa requires food for two. The first time Miranda sees Alex smile is when the two find a cache of hidden food at a nearby farm. “Amazing,” she writes. “Enough food for all of us” (133). They plan a celebration, with food at its center—a carryover from pre-disaster times, when major and minor holidays alike called for particular foodstuffs. The celebration is a reminder that food is not only a means of survival but also a symbolic gesture of hope and community. This symbolic importance of food is a universal cultural inheritance from earlier, pre-industrial times, when food was also scarce. Abundance is worthy of celebration, a sign of hope.
It is not only food that is scarce, however, and the characters must grapple with the loss of other supplies and services. When Miranda thinks to look through people’s makeup bags and travel kits as she searches empty houses for usable goods, she is thrilled to discover small amounts of soap, shampoo, and shaving cream. She also searches for laundry detergent and other household cleaning products. While these items are not strictly necessary for survival, they offer a degree of comfort that instills hope—a reminder of the better times that once existed and may yet return. As Miranda notes during one of her searches, “So much stuff. It’s amazing how much stuff people used to have” (25). While this observation serves as an implicit critique of consumer culture, it also points to the loss of normalcy with which the characters must contend. In addition, the characters must learn how to function without running water, reliable electricity, or internet service. Global communications, in general, are a luxury of the past.
This lack of communication informs many of the psychological challenges against which the characters struggle. Miranda has no avenue through which to contact her father; she does not know if he has survived, much less if Lisa gave birth, until they return in person. Lisa does not know the fate of her parents, as she and Hal are unable to reach the West Coast, just as Alex and Julie never know the fates of their parents with certainty.
Nevertheless, even though hope is hard to come by, each character confronts that challenge in different ways; without hope, there can be no future and no moving forward. In the falling rain, Miranda sees that “[s]omething’s changed” (4), and thus she begins writing in her diaries again—a tentative form of hope. Dad recognizes that “[l]ife catches you by surprise. It always does. But there’s good mixed in with the bad. It’s there” (177). Mom understands that leaving Howell in the end means embracing hope, no matter how frightening the unknown might be. Alex imparts his greatest lesson to Miranda: “He taught me to trust in tomorrow” (239). Thus, even though consumer culture is essentially wiped out in an instant by an unforeseen disaster (or an extreme climate event), the world still turns and beckons the survivors forward.
The Challenge of Accepting a New Reality
As the title of the book implies, “this world” is not the world that once was. The global disasters and irrevocable climate change that have followed the asteroid strike have disrupted the very notion of normalcy, and the terms of human existence and social organization have changed forever. All the characters bear witness to the horrors of this new and often terrifying world. They must also learn to survive in the new reality they are forced to inhabit. They must redefine what ordinary circumstances are and accept compromises in favor of survival.
Unsurprisingly, the children are the first to recognize that what was once ordinary has forever changed. The adults, especially Mom, cling to the familiar—the family may not have enough food, but the house will be clean—and take comfort in upholding traditional moral values, such as honesty and respect (for others’ property, for example). However, these ideas have become little more than irrelevant gestures toward a world that no longer exists. The book begins with Miranda writing in her journal in the middle of the night, “shivering […] in the kitchen, away from the warmth of the woodstove” (1). She writes by hand because the electricity appears only sporadically; in this new normal, she must take advantage of the light (and privacy) when she can.
Later, when Matt returns with Syl, calling her his wife, Mom balks, but Matt quickly sets her straight: “Yeah, Syl and I didn’t have a minister or bridesmaids or rice, but that doesn’t make us any less married. Not in this world, Mom” (53). The old rituals are obsolete, and there are no authorities left to preside over them anyway. Everyone makes their own way in this world. When Mom continues to protest—“If Matt had brought you home under different circumstances, ordinary circumstances, I’d be delighted”—Matt again stops her short: “These are ordinary circumstances,” he remonstrates (54). Mom’s rules and objections are no longer relevant: The old world is not coming back, and everyone must reconfigure their understanding of “normal” and “ordinary.”
Miranda, too, grasps the new reality more quickly than Mom. When Mom sends Matt and Jon on another fishing trip, ostensibly for more food but actually in a bid to keep Matt from Syl, Miranda realizes that what was once ordinary is no longer possible. She sympathizes with Matt’s frustration, saying, “In an ordinary world he wouldn’t have to leave his wife of four days,” but she also acknowledges that “in an ordinary world he wouldn’t have exchanged vows with a strange girl the day after meeting her” (59). Still, Miranda remains at odds, on occasion, with her new normal. Syl’s stories about her time on the road give Miranda nightmares. Miranda ends her May journal with an indictment of the post-apocalyptic world in which she now must survive: “I hate this world we live in” (83). Only the last five words make it into the title, implying that no matter one’s feelings about the new reality, one must ultimately accept it.
The struggle for survival in this world also indicates a new and harsh reality—not to mention a constant and anxious preoccupation with death. After Miranda happens upon a mound of bodies in a field on the outskirts of town, she cannot relinquish the horrifying image: “I saw what I saw, and I know—with a cold, cruel certainty—that someday, somewhere, we’ll be part of a mountain of bodies reaching up toward the sunless sky” (39). She also thinks of all the horrors she has not witnessed—the tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, for example—that nevertheless “have changed [her] life” (67). When Syl tells Miranda stories about her time in an evacuation camp, Miranda understands why Syl keeps much of this information from Matt: Syl was obligated to barter her body for safe passage. In the old world, this might have entailed a difficult moral compromise, but in this world, it simply ensures security, “extra food or a blanket” (194). Syl is not ashamed of her actions; they were necessary for her survival.
Finally, even though this world will continue to challenge the survivors in unexpected and extreme ways, they must also continue to rise to such challenges. For a long time, Mom refuses to leave her home, fearing that “everything will collapse” if she does (219). Yet to allow those fears, however reasonable, to control one’s actions is to submit to certain death; this world requires action. Syl goads Mom into helping after the tornado has struck: “‘See,’ she said. ‘The world came to an end while you’ve been hiding. Now move!’” (219). Mom snaps out of her fearful lethargy and leads the charge, both to rescue the others and to move the makeshift family onward. Speaking to Alex, she reminds him, “[T]here’s a world to live in, a world that needs us” (236), and he knows that he will move with the family, toward tomorrow. As in many dystopian or post-apocalyptic young adult series—The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Delirium, to name a few—it is the young who embrace or enact change. Miranda, Alex, Syl, Matt, and Jon will inherit and eventually shape this world they live in.
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By Susan Beth Pfeffer
