38 pages • 1 hour read
John GuareSix Degrees of Separation
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Sections 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 7 Summary
Trent Conway appears on stage and Tess comments on his “beady little eyes staring out at [her]” (75). She tells the audience that she went to him at MIT with “a tape recorder strapped to me” and “just pressed him and pressed him and pressed him” (75). Trent appears on stage with Paul, who is dressed in “jeans and a tank top, high-top sneakers” (76). There is “Rain. Distant thunder. Jazz playing somewhere off” (76).
Trent tells Paul that, “This is the way you must speak. Hear my accent” (76). He proceeds to coach Paul on what words he should use and tells him “you say bodd-ill. It’s bottle. Say bottle of beer” (76). Paul says, “Bodd-ill a bee-ya” (76).
Paul finds Trent’s address book and tells him to “tell me about these people” (77). Trent tries to get him to “come to bed” but Paul is “hypnotized by the address book” (77). After learning that all the people in the book are rich, he comments that it “[m]ust be very hard to be with rich people […] You have to give them presents” (77). Trent tells him, “Not at all. Rich people do something for you, you give them a pot of jam” (77).
Paul offers to remove clothing in exchange for information and “secrets” (78) about the people in the address book and Trent begins telling him about them, including sharing Ouisa and Flan’s address, and saying that they have “a double-sided Kandinsky” (78).
Trent embraces Paul “with fierce tenderness” (79) and outlines his plan for him, promising to “tell you about family after family” and declaring that, “You’ll never not fit in again. We’ll give you a new identity” (79). He imagines arriving at one of their homes and pretending to meet Paul for the first time, suggesting that “[i]f it all happens under their noses, they can’t judge me. They can’t disparage you” (79). Paul kisses him and says, “That’s enough for today” (79), then leaves with the address book.
Trent tells Tess that he met Paul “in a doorway” on “a rainy night in Boston” (80) and that he “stayed with me for three months” while they “went through the address book letter by letter” (79). He says that Paul “vanished by the L’s” (79), taking “my stereo and sport jacket and my word processor and my laser printer. And my skis. And my TV” (80). Despite that, Trent refuses to press charges and “sure would like to” see him again (79).
When Tess plays Ouisa the tape recording, she is amazed that “Paul learned all that in three months” (81). She says she has heard that “everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on the planet” (81), but adds that “you have to find the right six people to make the connection” (81).
Section 8 Summary
Flan comes on and says that they did not hear from Paul for some time and Ouisa reports that, one day, “our doorman spit on my husband” (82). The doorman comes on stage, “spits at Flan” and tells him “I know all about your son […] The Negro son you deny […] the black son you make live in Central Park” (82). Ouisa announces, “The next chapter. Rick and Elizabeth and Paul sit on the grass in Central Park” (82). Rick and Elizabeth are both in their twenties. They run on stage with Paul laughing and “having a great time singing a cheery song” (83). Paul “is wearing the pink shirt” (83).
On learning that Rick and Elizabeth are from Utah, Paul asks, “Do they have black people in Utah?” and Rick answers, “Maybe two. Yes, the Mormons brought in two” (83). Rick and Elizabeth talk about their aspirations to be actors, and Elizabeth explains that “you have to have technique” (84). Paul says this is “like the painters” and explains that his father “has a Kandinsky” and is called “John Flanders Kittredge” (84).
Paul explains that he is the result of Flan’s “radical days” when he “went down South as a freedom marcher,” met Paul’s mother “and married her in a fit of sentimental righteousness and knocked her up with me and came back here and abandoned her” (84). He claims that Flan’s “new wife—the white wife—The Louisa Kittredge Call Me Ouisa Wife” (84) will not let his father see him. Rick and Elizabeth say that Paul should go and see his father, but Paul says that he does not “want to embarrass him” (86).
When Paul says that he is sleeping in the park, Elizabeth and Rick invite him to stay in their tiny “railroad loft” (87) and Paul accepts. On stage, the “light changes to the loft” (87) and Paul is coaching Rick on how he “must speak” (87), repeating Trent’s earlier directions word for word, right down to the instruction to “say bottle of beer” (87). He also tells him that what rich people “love” is “a fancy pot of jam” (87).
Paul says that Rick and Elizabeth have given him the courage to try and see his father. He leaves and the others “lay on their backs and dream” (87), imagining all the classic theatrical parts they want to play. Paul runs in saying that Flan wrote to him saying that he “sold a Cezanne to the Japanese and made millions and he can give me money” (88) without Ouisa knowing about it.
Paul promises to give Elizabeth and Rick “the money to put on a showcase of any play you want” (89) once he gets the money from Flan. However, he says that he has to meet him in Maine and does not have the $250 he needs to get there. Rick says, “We could lend it to him for a week” (89) but Elizabeth reluctantly refuses, only to have Rick accuse her of being like Ouisa, one of “[t]hese women holding on to all the purse strings” (90).
Elizabeth leaves and Rick tells the audience that they “stopped by the bank” (90) and he gave Paul the money. Elizabeth reappears and tells the audience that she could not get money out of a cash machine and was told that the money had been withdrawn and her account had been closed.
Rick returns and speaks to the audience, explaining that Paul “told me he had some of his own money and he wanted to treat me” (90-91), recounting how they rented tuxedos and went dancing together in “the Rainbow Room” (91). On the way back, Rick was worrying about explaining the money to Elizabeth when Paul “asked me if he could fuck me and I had never done anything like that and he did and it was fantastic” (91).
Afterwards, Paul vanished, and Rick realized that “he had no money of his own. He had spent my money—our money—on that night in the Rainbow Room” (91). He frets about facing Elizabeth and questions, “What did I let him do to me?”, and “What have I done?” (91).
Sections 7-8 Analysis
Trent’s account of his time with Paul reveals the origins of Paul’s new identity. Having picked up Paul “in a doorway” on “a rainy night in Boston” (80), Trent attempts to “give [him] a new identity” (79) as a sophisticated, educated young man of Trent’s own social class by teaching him phrases and “correct” pronunciation. In doing so, he reveals the latent prejudices of his community and the fact that they would only accept a black man, both as Trent’s lover and as a person, if he appears to come from a similar, privileged background to them. He also reinforces these prejudices because he does not question or challenge them but only attempts to make Paul fit into them.
Trent presents his training as something he is doing for Paul so that he will “never not fit in again” (79). However, in reality, it is a way for him to have Paul without having to give up his social circle and his privilege and making sure that his friends and family “can’t judge [him]” (79). Paul is not interested in taking on “a new identity” (79) for Trent’s sake; rather, he wants to do it for his own benefit. He uses Trent’s attraction to him to gather the information and “secrets” (78) he needs to infiltrate Trent’s community and shows no more compunction about this than he does about taking Trent’s belongings. Despite his betrayal, Trent, like Ouisa, still finds himself drawn to Paul and willing to forgive him.
Paul also appears to feel no guilt about taking Rick and Elizabeth’s money, despite their kindness towards him. This can be read as simply selfish deception, but it can also be seen as a form of politically-motivated “wealth redistribution” in which Paul, a homeless black man, takes money from two white wannabe actors from a place where apparently the only black people are two “the Mormons brought in” (83).
The way Paul gets this money is significant. Using a mixture of the lesson in high-class speech that Trent taught him and information about the Kittredges, he claims that Flan is his father who will not speak to him or see him. In some respects, this can be read as an attack on Flan, a sullying of his character that leads to repercussions like the doorman spitting on him. Certainly, the descent from radical “freedom marcher” (84) to settled, privileged, white intelligentsia and absentee father mirrors Flan’s actual descent from passionate appreciator of art to money-fixated art dealer. However, it can also be read as a genuine effort to form, through the imagination, family bonds with the Kittredges, a reading that will gain more credence as the play draws to a close.
