Previous
Part 2: Dead Language
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Feed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corporations and Consumerism
Apathy, Happiness, and Satisfaction
Resistance
Class and Segregation
The Environment
Summary
Analysis
The friends are released from the hospital. One by one, they visit doctors and technicians, who examine their brains to make sure there are no “permanent hacks.” Suddenly, Titus can feel his feed again—there’s an ad for a “Ford Laputa,” along with hundreds of others. The ads come “pouring down” on Titus and his friends, who are so happy they laugh and cheer.
There’s a clever allusion to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (another speculative novel that’s really a veiled satire of the present-day). Laputa is the name of the society whose emotionally crippled citizens have been blessed with superior technology, which they use to assert their control over the rest of the world—a pretty accurate way to describe the society of Feed.
Themes
The ads explain that people have been protesting the American “annexation of the moon” under the leadership of the American President Trumbull. Other ads sell a “feed-sim battle game” featuring “detonation and viscera.”
The United States is so aggressively militaristic that it invades territories to which it has no right, presumably to exploit their resources and maintain global dominance. The America of the future, in this sense, is not so very different from the America of the past and present.
Themes
