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Chapter 20
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fever Pitch, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession vs. Fandom
Sports, Identity, and Community
Escapism
Sports and Masculinity
Summary
Analysis
After Nick starts watching games from the North Bank, an adult terrace, he also begins to share the crowd’s rage when any away team scores a goal. At one game, Coventry scores a goal that is particularly maddening to Arsenal fans. For the first time in his life, Nick is so enraged that he joins in the Arsenal fans’ threatening chants to Coventry fans. He thinks that ff he were close to a Coventry fan in the moment, he would hit them.
Because Arsenal’s fanbase is Nick’s main source of social input, it impacts his development greatly. He becomes more similar to the other fans and begins to share their characteristic anger and violent tendencies. Nick begins to absorb ideas about masculinity through football—namely, that men are angry and violent.
Themes
In the present, Nick finds this behavior embarrassing, though he still feels angry when the opposing team scores. He posits that masculinity is a cluster of traits from which one can pick and choose. Women tend to believe, Nick thinks, that if a man likes football he also drinks heavily and is misogynistic. This isn’t the case, Nick now realizes, but when he was a teenager, he thought that if he was an Arsenal supporter, then he also had to be aggressive and belligerent. Nick reflects that he was trying to muster as much masculinity as he could through Arsenal, partially because his father wasn’t around.
Football gives Nick an unhealthy view of masculinity when he is young. Nick readily absorbs these notions of masculinity at the time without questioning them, because he had no other source to learn from. Without his father, football is the only way Nick learns how adult men act. Nick the adult narrator offers a levelheaded view on his younger self, suggesting he’s since put aside these unhealthy ideas about what masculinity entails.
Themes
