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Part 3: Fight and Flight
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
Back at his house, Titus leads Violet inside. Violet tells Titus, “I wish there was someplace we could go,” and adds, “There’s a whole universe out there.” Violet explains that she doesn't have a lot of time and apologizes for embarrassing Titus. She exhales hard and says, “You toss something up in the air, and you expect it to come back down again.” Titus has no idea what this means.
Violet is hungry to explore the world, but she isn’t sure where to begin. One possible interpretation of her statement: Violet thought that Titus and his friends would reciprocate her friendliness and curiosity instead of responding with cruelty.
Themes
Suddenly, Mom and Smell Factor return home. Violet ends up staying for dinner, from which Dad is absent. Mom chats Titus about how Violet is a “great girl.”
Mom barely knows Titus, but she goes through the motions anyway, praising Violet in the blandest terms.
Themes
On the drive back to Violet’s home, Titus asks Violet, “Do they know how long?” and Violet says she doesn’t know but adds, “It could happen anytime.” Titus spends the rest of the night doing homework, thinking, “that was the only thing left to do.”
Titus is oddly passive when faced with the knowledge that Violet could die soon. He’s so shallow that he has no idea how to respond to this terrifying news or even how to comfort his girlfriend.
Themes
The chapter ends with a clip from the “Christian Cyberkidz network,” about a dog that has died. A boy’s father tells the grieving boy, “That dog was a good dog, but she wasn’t like a superdog, with powers.”
The clip echoes Violet’s point about how society has cheapened death: in this feedcast, a child is instructed not to grieve for his dead dog, since, it would seem, there’s a far superior “superdog” that he can buy instead.
Themes
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