Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Fiction | Novel | Adult

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Themes

Gender Bias Faced by Women in Gaming

When Sadie Green plays video games as a young woman, she notes that “she often had to put herself into a male point of view to even understand a game at all” (44). Understanding this point of view is important for Sadie since she is a game-maker. However, adopting this point of view means she has to pretend to be okay with sexist depictions of women. In the late 1990s, when Sadie starts making games, “girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming—it wasn’t cool to point such things out” (44). Therefore, Sadie has to ignore female NPCs in various states of undress and hypersexualized main female characters in games, as well as sexist and insensitive behaviors in the real world. People like Dov, and sometimes even Samson Masur, tend to minimize the stress such willful ignorance produces. However, it has an enormous psychological cost for Sadie and other women like her. Sadie learns to become complicit in her own erasure to be successful, but that makes her bitter toward Sam, and facilitates her falling into an unhealthy relationship with Dov. When Sam agrees for Ichigo to be a boy, he simply doesn’t factor how important Ichigo’s lack of gender is for Sadie, a woman constantly boxed in by her gender. At gaming conferences and promotional tours, the men at Opus push Sam to be the face of the company. Audiences direct very few questions toward Sadie, and “Sadie felt herself diminish” beside Sam (133). The different treatment Sam and Sadie receive from gaming professionals and audiences is one of the major factors that contributes to Sadie’s mistrust of Sam.

Sadie’s relationship with Dov is also informed by the sexist world of tech they inhabit. Sadie is attracted to Dov not just because he is a brilliant game designer, but also because he openly values her mind. This is such a rarity that Sadie immediately feels grateful to Dov, ignoring the big red flag that Dov is blatantly abusing his power in pursuing her. The skewed gender dynamics of the time let Dov get away with dating his student with impunity. Later, Dov abuses Sadie under the guise of dominance play. One of the biggest questions in the narrative is why Sadie puts up with the abuse. It can be inferred that Sadie is so conditioned to minimize her pain and discomfort that when Dov slaps her or handcuffs her against her will, she thinks she is exaggerating her own concerns.

It is not just Sadie’s character who faces sexism in the novel. Sam’s mother, Anna Lee—another bright, beautiful woman—has to navigate sexual harassment in the workplace. In Anna’s case, the abuse is amplified by her racial identity. When Anna, a trained actor, finds work at the game show Press that Button, her brief says to smile with “big teeth and happy eyes” (164) so the host, Chip Willingham, feels he is funny, even when he is not. When Chip meets Anna, he makes a sexualized comment about her body and physically assaults her. Anna’s job is made bleak by Chip’s continuing, aggressive advances. To cope, Anna imagines she is on a parallel game show where she has to escape Chip’s harassment and keep her job. The pressure Anna faces is enormous, yet the pressures that sexism and sexual harassment exert on women are often dismissed by people.

The Complex Nature of Grief

While the novel has an uplifting message of camaraderie and hope at its core, it contextualizes this message against the reality of loss. People in the novel find hope despite tragedy rather than hope in the absence of tragedy. Three major losses provide the narrative’s pivot points: Sam’s loss of his mother, his loss of his foot, and Sadie’s loss of Marx. However, many other losses and traumas dot the characters’ lives: Sadie loses her sense of self and personhood in her relationship with Dov, Sadie loses her grandmother, the other Anna Lee loses her life, and Sam loses Dong Hyun and the possibility of a romantic future with Sadie.

Intertwined with the theme of unavoidable loss is the ubiquity of violence. As Marx’s death shows, the undercurrents of violence rippling in society can erupt at any time, causing devastation. Sam’s brush with traumatic violence begins early on when he witnesses the other Anna Lee attempt suicide. Though his mother ensures he doesn’t have to watch the woman die, Sam is deeply traumatized by the event anyway. The other Anna Lee “appeared to him almost every night in his dreams” (80), the smell of her blood mixed with the scent of his mother’s perfume. His mother’s death is a permanent, living force he carries around, and it rises to the surface every time he is sick, troubled, or in the hospital. The trauma of loss doesn’t disappear; one simply learns to live with it, as symbolized by Sam’s phantom limb pain. The pain never quite goes away, and Sam just learns to function despite it.

When Sadie loses Marx, she descends into grief exacerbated by postnatal depression. Sadie cannot bring herself to visit the office and grows angry with Sam when he tells her he wants to get Marx’s bloodstains cleaned from the floor. She shuts out work, which used to be her solace. Sam notes that Sadie’s been hit especially hard by the death because she hasn’t had practice dealing with a great loss. With this, the book asserts that coping with loss is not a matter of character, but practice: One has no choice but to cope as time goes on. This is precisely what happens with Sadie; after five years of losing Marx, she finally learns to think of him without crying. The text also touches on how coping with grief is complicated by the guilt of forgetting a loved one. As Sadie learns to live with Marx’s absence, she feels guilty because she is forgetting “the sound of his voice…the way he looked walking away, or running up a flight of stairs” (381). With this, the novel examines the complex nature of grief and loss. It is only play—which the text positions as a childlike chase of hope and adventure—that propels characters to keep moving in this grief-struck world. For Sadie, the first such opportunity is the expansion pack of Master of Revels, where she chases the possibility of a Marx made immortal on stage. For Sam, it is the chance to reinvent himself through games. For Marx, it is the possibility of imagining himself as a character in a game with more than one chance at life.

Play as Hope

One of the central questions the novel examines is the appeal of games and play, and why people play games, read books, and pursue narratives that simulate other realities. The answer arrives late in the novel when Sam reflects that “Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept them from despair” (387). For Sam, the willingness to play includes the willingness to take a chance, solve a puzzle, or pursue what the heart desires. It is why his mother willed herself to get lost on the roads of LA and why he made his way to Sadie through a pack of commuters in December 1996. In other words, play gives people hope and propels them onward.

In the novel, video games are treated as an art form. Zevin does not have characters explain why games are a narrative form on par with books or cinema, because that knowledge is implicit and accepted in the text. She subverts the idea that video games are destructive or frivolous; instead, she shows how they are complex narratives that invite people to play. Video games and simulations provide people with hope, new opportunities, and lives. Because the narrative dwells on the details and intricacies of building games, readers start to see the world-building behind online games, much as if they were movies or novels. To create this immersive effect, Zevin uses gaming terms such as engines, pixels, and expansion packs. Characters use gaming shorthand such as NPCs and MCs (main characters), and Sadie and Sam think in terms of “volumetric lighting,” “ludic (play) techniques” and so on. They reference games from The Oregon Trail to Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros. Play is part of their reality, and play is what makes a harsh reality possible and bearable. For gamers and game-makers, this play takes form in video games.

Video games are an immersive medium, and one of the pleasures they offer is the possibility of many lives. Marx stresses this point when he suggests their company be named Tomorrow Games. He quotes Macbeth’s soliloquy (Act V, Scene 5) in support:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

In the play’s context, the speech is bleak, indicating that all tomorrows ultimately end in death. However, in the context of games, the speech offers hope since there is always another tomorrow. As Marx tells Sadie and Sam: “What is a game? It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…no loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent ever” (336). Zevin’s novel takes its title from this very idea, which highlights its centrality to the text. When a fading Marx dreams of himself as a bird in a game, it does not actually mean he gets another life. What he gets is the hope of another life, the possibility of imagination. That is why play and hope are intertwined, and why playing Pioneers gives Sadie a way out of her grief.