Wool

The ritual execution of cleaning holds a great deal of significance for the people of the silo: “Cleaning was the highest law and the deepest religion, and both of these were intertwined and housed within [IT’s] secretive walls” (190). The ritual execution of cleaning holds a great deal of significance for the people of the silo. It is, for them, a chance to relieve the pent-up psychological tension that develops as a result of living in a highly rigid society. The cleaning after-party gets raucous as people feel a sense of immunity, believing that they will not be punished so soon after an execution. More sensitive and perceptive people—like Jahns, Juliette, and her father—see the cleaning as a reason for lament rather than celebration. The practice disturbs Jahns, who considers it “barbaric” (54). Bernard reveals to Lukas that it is also a way to prevent people from wanting to go out and from dreaming “of a better world” (473). He calls this a “sickness,” and says that “cleaning is one sort of cure” (473).

The full extent of the importance to the functioning of the silo becomes apparent when Lukas reads a section in the Order—“In Case of a Failed Cleaning: Prepare for War” (296). This directive reveals that the cleaning is crucial to the psychological control that maintains order in the silo. Indeed, when Juliette fails to clean, order breaks down and an uprising begins as the people of Mechanical start to see past the lies IT perpetrated. Later, when Lukas is being tested by the voice from Silo 1—which asks him: “What does it take to protect these things we hold so dear?”—he correctly replies “sacrifice” (412), a reference to the cleanings.

The cleaning also manifests a central conflict of Wool, that of the life of the individual versus the safety of the whole. The cleaning sacrifices people every few years to keep the whole functioning smoothly. 

Wool implies that living underground in tightly controlled conditions, as the people of the silo do, places a heavy psychological burden on them. Cleanings serve not only as a punishment but also as a means to relieve this pressure. Holston feels the pressure of his position as sheriff: “The view outside was getting worse every day, and he could feel the pressure, as sheriff, to find someone. It was growing, like steam building up in the silo, ready to launch something out.” (18). Reflecting that there has not been a cleaning in five years, he also thinks: “The enormous pent up pressure of the place was now hissing through the seams in whispers” (24). The pressure, for both Jahns and Holston, is internal as well as external. Jahns feels the pressure of the duties as her role as mayor as well as the physical pressure that her aging body is subject to in the unnatural vertical world. As she goes down on her journey, “the descent was like the uncoiling of a steel spring, pushing her down” (53). Later, the sense of pressure is heightened as Juliette descends many floors underwater, barely getting out alive, and as the workers of Mechanical are forced to retreat to lower and lower levels when they are under siege.

The servers, for much of the novel, are a source of mystery, reverence, and contention. Even the mayor, Jahns, does not know exactly what they are for:“Whatever the silo had been, or had been designed for, she knew without asking or being told that these strange machines were some organ of primacy” (64). The servers hold a mystical importance in the silo, imbuing IT, as the curator of the servers, with its elite status. The servers take up a great deal of resources but few dare question it, except for Juliette, who says to Jahns:“I don’t remember a server ever feeding someone or saving someone’s life or stitching up a hole in their britches” (88). Juliette, who is highly pragmatic and not computer-savvy, does not see the value of them, especially before she meets Solo, and resents the importance the silo attributes to them. Later, the significance of the servers is revealed. They store all accumulated human knowledge from before the apocalyptic event that drove people underground, or “the Legacy”(415). The servers, then, signify the sequestering of this information, the deception that underlies life in the silo, and the possibility of rehabilitating aboveground human life in the future.

Juliette, who cannot tolerate the state of disrepair of many of the things in the silo, prides herself on having repaired a watch. Watch mechanics are lost knowledge in the silo, and Juliette’s repair of hers represents her resolve that anything can be fixed:

Juliette checked her watch. The sight of its second hand ticking around in its constant path comforted her. Whenever she had doubts about something working, she looked at her wrist. Not to see the time, but to see a thing she had fixed. A repair so intricate and impossible—one that had taken years of cleaning and setting parts almost too small to see—that it made her current task, whatever it was, feel small by comparison. (117)

When she is arrested, she is disturbed to think how “the thing would eventually fall into disrepair and return to being a trinket, a useless thing worn upside down for its pretty band” (195). The watch represents hope for the future and Juliette’s pragmatic belief in looking forward rather than at mistakes of the past. The situation, therefore, looks uncertain when she is separated from her watch, until the end scene, when “she twisted the dial on the side of her watch, an ancient tic returning like it had never left.” (503)

In Silo 17, the knife replaces the watch as the item that Juliette clings to, a symbol of the way violence threatens the future. Juliette “desperately missed her watch. All she had these days was her knife. She laughed at the switch, at having gone from counting the seconds in her life to fending for each and every one of them” (480).

The survival of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the silo represents the enduring power of art and the timelessness of tragic themes. In “The Unraveling,” each chapter starts with a quote from Romeo and Juliet. As the fighting in Silo 18 intensifies, it threatens to repeat the fate of Silo 17. As Romeo and Juliet unknowingly headed for their tragic fates, so Juliet and the other mechanics seem to do. The references to past uprisings emphasize this idea of tragic events repeating themselves. Lastly, Juliette and Lukas are star-crossed lovers as Romeo and Juliet were. Rather than coming from warring clans, they come from warring departments in the silo, Mechanical and IT.