Previous
Chapter 26
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
While a student at Cambridge, Nick has his first serious romantic relationship. When his girlfriend comes to Highbury to see Arsenal, Nick is struck by how she can’t stop laughing when the crowd stands up to celebrate a goal. Nick realizes how funny and ridiculous football must look to an outsider. He remembers that game because Arsenal played particularly well—they always seem to perform unusually whenever Nick has a major event in his personal life.
Nick’s first serious girlfriend helps open his eyes to the extent of his intense obsession. Again, Nick imagines that Arsenal’s performance closely reflects his own life’s ups and downs, though objectively they don’t seem to match up very closely.
Themes
Through this relationship, Nick comes to understand (what he understands to be) the fundamental differences between men and women. His girlfriend knows a little bit about many things, like poetry, art, and music. Nick on the other hand, like all the men he knows, knows everything about one thing—football, in his case, and specifically Arsenal. Most women seem to have a large variation in their hobbies and interests and are never monomaniacal about one subject to the extent that men can be. Nick finds it baffling how much more interesting women’s personalities are than men’s.
Nick’s realization about gender is likely very biased. Nick himself is monomaniacal, and he talks to other men mostly about football. To him, it seems that all men are monomaniacal, but it’s more likely that Nick’s conversations with men simply don’t often go beyond the surface level. That said, it does seem to be true that football culture strongly affects gender norms, and it is perhaps less socially acceptable for men to be interested in poetry, for example, than sports.
Themes
