Skippy Dies

“Imagine it […] everything that is, everything that has ever been—every grain of sand, every drop of water, every star, every planet, space and time themselves—all crammed into one dimensionless point where no rules or laws apply, waiting to fly out and become the future. When you think about it, the Big Bang’s a bit like school, isn’t it?”

Ruprecht’s characteristic optimism is embodied by this passage. He views school as the origin point for all of life to come, which explains his proactive attitude toward academics and extracurriculars. One day, he hopes to become a scientist like his hero, Professor Tamashi, but for the moment, he enjoys the undefined space he occupies in the world.

“But the fact is—the fact is that they live in a world of facts, one of which is that there are no dragons; there are only the pale torpid days, stringing by one like another, a clouded necklace of imitation pearls, and a love binding him to a life he never actually chose. Is this all it’s ever going to be? A grey tapestry of okayness? Frozen in a moment he drifted into?”

The relationship between Howard and Halley is defined by its ordinariness. Halley hopes that Howard will marry her, allowing her to become a naturalized Irish citizen. However, Howard fears the monotony that married life will bring, especially since he is so dissatisfied with life already.

“Change is not a dirty word. Neither for that matter is profit. Profit is what enables change, positive change that helps everyone, such as for example demolishing the 1865 building and constructing an entirely new twenty-first-century wing in its place.”

In this passage, Acting Principal Greg Costigan summarizes his vision for directing Seabrook College as it transitions into lay management. Where the Paraclete Fathers emphasized the pastoral mission in the students’ education, Greg seeks to modernize the school, revamping it as a business-oriented institution.

“Dreaming’s not something we encourage here either, Howard. Reality, that’s what we’re all about.”

A later passage summarizes the acting principal’s perspective toward the ideals of education. Ironically, Greg will later come to shun certain truths in favor of institutional convenience, suggesting the novel’s Critique of Institutional Norms and Abuses. He decides to forego escalating the matter of Skippy’s abuse, citing the cost it will have on the school’s reputation.

“Go easy: the motto of the age. For these children, as for their parents, everything must be easy. It is their entitlement, it is their right, and anything that infringes on it, anything that requires them to lift themselves even momentarily from their cosy stupor, is wrong. They will live their lives without ever knowing want or hardship, and they will take this as no more than their due, sanctioned, somewhere in the vaporous satellite-strewn heavens, by the same amorphous God who brings them Swedish furniture and four-wheel-drive jeeps, who appears when summoned for weddings and christenings. A kindly, twinkle-eyed God. An easy God.”

In this passage, Murray describes Father Green’s repulsion for the present generation of youth, which creates a contrast with the implicit upbringing that the priest experienced in his own early life. He resents the fact that the changing times have caused people to be more easygoing and sympathetic, suggesting that in his own youth, such attitudes were shunned in the interest of building stern and stony personalities.

“Sometimes the reason we do not see the answer is that we are looking too closely at the question.”

Ruprecht hears this quote when his wave oscillator initially fails. The television goes on by itself, and he is encouraged by a familiar voice to step back from the problem he wishes to solve. This echoes Ruprecht’s inability to understand what is being said to him apart from the science that surrounds it, such as when Skippy asks him if it’s possible to change the past.

“‘I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s just not how I expected my life would be.’

‘What did you expect?’

Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose—this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’ Seeing Farley’s blank look, he elaborates: ‘A direction. A point. A sense that it’s not just a bunch of days piling up on top of each other.’”

Howard expresses his disappointment with the monotony of adult life in this passage. He wishes for his life to more closely resemble a narrative. In some ways, Murray fulfills this by giving him an arc in which he learns to accept boredom as a fact of life. In other ways, such as the resolution of Skippy’s abuse, Murray rejects it.

“It’s the same thing you’re talking about—you know, on a quotidian level, it’s difficult to find any evidence of a narrative arc or a larger meaning in your life, but at the same time, if you try and give your life a meaning—like live according to a principle or a mission or an ideal or whatever—then inevitably you distort the details. The small things keep agitating against it and popping out of place.”

Farley tries to address Howard’s concerns in the previous passage by pointing out that the universe is fundamentally resistant to meaning. He suggests that even if Howard were to self-determine the meaning of his life, the outcome would still confound him. This foreshadows his attempt to escape boredom by breaking up with Halley, believing that it will allow him to pursue a relationship with Aurelie.

“He’s still freaking out—today, especially, he hasn’t been able to eat and every time he thinks of Frisbee Girl, which is every second, his heart starts going a trillion miles an hour—but it’s a different kind of freaking out […] Can there be such a thing as happy terror? All Skippy knows is that he doesn’t feel like blocking it out.”

Lori’s entrance into Skippy’s life is powerful enough to distract him from the things that cause his anxiety. The irony is that the prospect of talking to Lori fills him with a different kind of anxiety, which Murray describes with the oxymoronic phrase “happy terror.”

“Each reintroduction repeated a truth at once shocking and totally banal: people grow up and became orthodontists.”

Howard is not only dissatisfied with the monotony of his own life but also surprised by the banality of others. Contrasted against Ruprecht’s optimism that Seabrook students will go on to live exciting lives, Murray uses this observation to show that most people grow up to live lives that are largely uninteresting and ordinary. Howard is terrified by the notion that people could be satisfied with that.

“‘I suppose we can’t really conceive of our way of life ever changing,’ she says, ignoring his clunky flattery. ‘Let alone coming to an end. It’s just like the boys here doing stupid things—you know, climbing electricity pylons, jumping their skateboards off ten-foot walls—because they can’t imagine getting hurt. They think they’ll go on for ever. So do we. But nothing goes on for ever. Civilization ends, everything ends, that’s what you teach them in History class, isn’t it?’”

In this passage, Aurelie delivers a keen observation about adolescence and the way one’s perspective of it changes as they get older. As adults, she and Howard can understand why the transition from youth to adulthood seems so dissatisfying in retrospect. She expands this to the whole of human history and connects this to Howard’s teaching work, implying that she considers him wise for doing so.

“People do crazy things, Aurelie said it herself. They do arbitrary things to test the boundaries, to feel free. But those moments don’t have any meaning beyond themselves. They don’t have any real connection with who you are, they aren’t life. Life is when you’re not doing something arbitrary to feel free. This is life, this living room, the furniture and trappings they have picked out and paid for with slow hours of work, the small treats and fancies their budget has allowed them.”

In this passage, Howard reflects on Aurelie’s imperative to fight boredom at all costs. He contrasts her pursuit of excitement and self-determination with the reality of the life he has with Halley. While Howard’s attempts to feel free may not represent his life, they still have consequences for it, as he is unable to reconnect with Halley after leaving her.

“In fact, maybe it is love after all. Why can’t we fall in love with a theory? Is it a person we fall in love with, or the idea of a person? So yes, Ruprecht has fallen in love. […] The question of reason, then, the question of evidence, these are wasted on him. Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?”

Murray draws a comparison between Skippy’s infatuation with Lori, Howard’s love for Aurelie, and Ruprecht’s love for string theory. Ruprecht feels that it is moot to prove that he loves string theory in the same way that Skippy’s attraction to Lori requires no explanation from his peers. On the other hand, Howard claims that he loves Aurelie, but Farley reminds him that he barely knows her, suggesting that evidence is more important in matters of love than any of them realize.

“Really liking something is an automatic way of making sure you don’t get it […] That’s the way it goes in this stupid crappy world.”

In this passage, Dennis suggests that Skippy’s desire for Lori has somehow ensured that they will not end up together. This resonates with Farley’s statement about the universe’s fundamental resistance to meaning since Dennis alludes to it as though it were natural law.

“Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents. But might the situation be different in other universes?”

Ruprecht’s thoughts sympathetically lean toward Skippy, making sense of the dynamic between him, Carl, and Lori through the lens of loneliness and asymmetry. This line of thinking will subtly influence his decision to redirect his research toward bringing Skippy back after he dies because he sees it as a salve to his own fundamental loneliness.

“And there, for a moment, on his knees by the foil-lined pod, he bides—like Moses’s mother, perhaps, with her bulrush basket on the banks of the Nile—gazing reflectively at the robot’s painted eyes, thinking that to do anything, epic or mundane, bound for glory or doomed to failure, is in its way to say goodbye to a world; that the greatest victories are therefore never without the shadow of loss; that every path you take, no matter how lofty or effulgent, aches not only with the memory of what you left behind, but with the ghosts of all the untaken paths, now never to be taken, running parallel.”

Murray poetically alludes to the turning point in the biblical Moses’ early life to describe the last moment before Ruprecht conducts his experiment. This passage also connects with “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, a poem referred to in one of the boys’ English classes.

“But as Professor Tamashi says, ‘Science is the realm of the formerly impossible.’”

Ruprecht maintains an almost religious devotion to the power of science. Much of this is influenced by his hero, Professor Hideo Tamashi, who notes in this passage that much of what is considered impossible in the present may be considered mundane and commonplace in the future. This is why Ruprecht refuses to resign himself to the idea that science cannot bring Skippy back from the dead.

“A heart is a door into another world, and once you open it, it is never truly closed. So although you may not see me…I’m always there with you.”

Skippy regularly plays the video game Hopeland throughout the narrative, which sometimes bleeds into reality. This statement is spoken by the princess character, and it foreshadows Howard’s lesson on memory, connection, and preservation, as well as Lori and Ruprecht’s final scene, which sees them forming a connection over their shared grief for Skippy.

“You’re always looking for ways out of things, Howard. Escape routes out of your own life. That’s why you liked me, because I wasn’t from here, and I seemed to offer something new. When I stopped being new, you slept with that woman, whoever she was. Now because you don’t have me I look like a way out again. You have something to aim for, you have a quest to get me back. But don’t you see, if you did get me back the quest would be over and you’d be bored again.”

In this passage, Halley delivers an assessment of Howard’s central character flaw. More than his cowardice, Howard is held back by his desire to flee from boredom and monotony. This also explains why he was drawn to Aurelie and establishes the challenge his character faces to resolve the issues around him without feeling the need to escape.

“To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every moment between you and all you are not, there dwells in the universe a secret harmony, a coherence and rightness like a balanced equation that’s out of reach for now but someday will reveal itself in its entirety.”

Ruprecht reckons with the apparent meaninglessness of the world by maintaining his belief that everything has a rational explanation. However, because the novel is about Navigating Adolescence as a Teen and as an Adult, Ruprecht is challenged by the discovery that his past assumptions about the world may be flawed. He has a firsthand experience with the fact that some things elude explanation entirely.

“Mother loves Ruprecht. Lori loves Skippy. God loves everybody. To hear people talk, you would think no one ever did anything but love each other. But when you look for it, when you search out this love everyone is always talking about, it is nowhere to be found […] Proposition: love, if it exists at all, does so primarily as an organizing myth, of a similar nature to God. Or: love is analogous to gravity, as postulated in recent theories, that is to say, what we experience faintly, sporadically, as love is in actuality the distant emanation of another world, the faraway glow of a love-universe that by the time it gets to us has almost no warmth left.”

An essential part of Ruprecht’s maturation is his transition to cynicism. He starts to disbelieve many of the things he previously upheld, such as Lori and Skippy’s love for each other. However, he continues to look at the concept of love through a scientific lens, posturing theories about its true nature. As the novel continues, Ruprecht’s belief in science will turn out to be the last thing he learns to disbelieve, setting the stage for his interaction with Lori, which restores his sense of meaning.

“‘It’s a good example of how history works,’ Howard says. ‘We tend to think of it as something solid and unchanging, appearing out of nowhere etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. But history, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.’”

Howard delivers a lecture that stands against the pedagogical approach of the institution he works for, underscoring the theme of Critiquing Institutional Norms and Abuses, as well as The Intersection of Personal Tragedy and Communal Grief. In this passage, he states that history is not so much an authoritative account of events but a narrative shaped by those who choose to remember and tell it. In doing so, he quietly encourages his students to tell the story of Skippy that makes sense, not to relent to the story that Greg and the school try to push over his memory.

“The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, you see. If she settles down with you and starts a home, then she loses her powers. Becomes merely a woman, so to speak. Which means no more poetry, which in Graves’s eyes was almost as bad as death. If she deserts you, on the other hand, then you find another muse to inspire you, and the whole circus starts all over again.”

Howard’s old teacher, Jim Slattery, teaches him one more lesson in adulthood, illuminating the nature of the White Goddess as a muse. In this passage, Slattery recontextualizes Howard’s fear of monotony as a strong desire for inspiration. He offers the Black Goddess as an alternative, teaching Howard to seek true, enduring love instead of indulgence.