Leaving the Neighborhood

I found the family's reaction to Keith leaving the neighborhood pretty interesting.  I think it shows something about the situation that they're in. Lauren's dad did get really mad after Keith left and they tried to look for him and everything, however it just didn't seem like they made as big of a deal about their child disappearing as I would expect, but maybe that's just from the frame of our society. Also the father dying didn't seem like that big of a shock either. That makes a lot of sense, considering there's people constantly dying and disappearing from their neighborhood. It probably kind of infiltrates your life and changes the way you think about people in your life and death.

What were Lauren's dad and Cory expecting from their children? Did they want them to just stay in the neighborhood and maybe take over their jobs? Marry, have babies, etc.? Or did they think the world would go back to how it used to be? Or, more probably, were they just surviving, as Lauren keeps saying - not really worrying about the future or abstract ideas of what could happen but instead just thinking about getting through each day. The neighborhood does seem semi-peaceful most of the time, and it's hard to imagine that they'd constantly be worrying about everybody's lives and staying alive. There's only so long a person can worry if they have to do it around the clock. After a while it feels like they might get used to the constant risks this society poses and stop actively thinking about them. Do you think you would ever stop worrying if you lived here?

Comments

  1. L. MoffittMay 20, 2021 at 9:05 AM

    I would never sleep if I lived there! In some ways the dystopian nightmare of this world seems more nightmarish than in the other books in part because it seems so believable, I think. It isn't always terrible -- like you say, sometimes it's semi-peaceful -- but that's almost worse, in a way, because you might become complacent. And then dead.

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