Feed
Pages 276-299
By: Jared Wojtas
Date: 4/22/15
Chapters
Summary
In the beginning of the chapter titled %51.5 Titus gets a message from Violet, which talks about how she loves Titus and explains to him that she thought he could teach her things. She also tells him that “there is always time to change, until there is not” (Anderson 276). Titus then goes to one of Jupiter’s moons to visit Marty’s aunt. He talks about how he was finally able to talk to Quendy after not being able to for so long. In the next chapter, Titus and his family receives a memory from his father. It is of a whale hunting trip. I thought it was weird because of how quickly it all happened. The dad explains everything that they did when catching the whale and it seemed like it took no time at all. After this Titus felt that something was wrong with Violet and he decided to visit her. He took his up car to her house, and her dad let him in. When he goes into her room and sees her, he says that she is covered in discs and that her head was almost completely shaved. She was there but he felt completely alone. She could see and hear but she could not control her body and she couldn't speak. Violet’s father begins to blame Titus and his friends for making Violet feel sorry. Titus tries to explain to him that, that isn't what happened. When he tries to do this Titus and her father get into an extreme verbal argument, swear words and all. After this argument, Titus sprints out of the house and goes home. He rips off all of his clothes and sits on the floor in his room. He begins ordering mass amounts of clothing all night and morning. He wears some really nice clothes and heads back to her house. The father lets him in silently. When he enters her room she still has discs on her, but he tries to tell her stories and gives her random facts that she loves. He begins to cry for the first time and tells her that he will always remember her and that when she comes back she will remember. At the end, ironically, he talks about a movie that is being made about kids who resist the feed. While he is saying this an advertisement comes up in his feed that tells him “everything must go” (Anderson 299).
Violet's state
Titus's coping habits
New historicism/Cultural lens
- Anderson, during his time of writing the book, he saw that trends and fashions were changing much faster than they were in the past. He amplified the effect that he saw to what it would be like in a hundred years.
- “It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it” (Anderson 279).
- Anderson is trying to get across that it isn't always good to buy the things that are presented to you and to buy them just to be “cool”.
Psychoanalytic lens
- “I cried sitting by her bed, and I told her the story of us. “it’s about the feed,” I said. “It’s about this meg normal guy, who doesn’t think about anything until one wacky day, when he meets a dissident with a heart of gold” (Anderson 297).
- I think that the author of the story is worried about if technology gets too advanced, that people will have to force themselves to stop thinking about whats going on with other people and huge corporations and advertisements, just to be able to cry.
- With all the ads and posts and instead of face to face interactions, people will become too distant from each other to be able to produce tears.
Essential Question: How does Feed illustrate the degeneration of human thought and language?
- “I told her stories. They were only one sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find” (Anderson 296).
- Even while trying his hardest, Titus found himself unable to produce proper sentences and tell a story, without relying on the feed.
- He did manage to refrain from using profanity to replace other words he didn't know, however he was still ineffective show true human thought and language.
Discussion Question:
What are your thoughts on the novel? Did it change your perspective in any way? Going green? Reliance on technology? Consumerism? Language? Awareness of persuasive appeals in commercials?