Previous
Sports, Identity, and Community
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fever Pitch, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Hornby often describes Arsenal as a crutch in his life. When he is a child and teenager, he goes to games so that he has an appropriate place to express the negativity that he harbors about his parents’ divorce and his later estrangement from his father. At this point, though Hornby uses the games to escape his family life, Arsenal is helpful to him. Over time, though, the role that football plays in his life changes. When Hornby is in college, he feels lost and empty. He has no ambitions to find a career or relationship. He becomes even more engrossed in football at this point, starting to support Cambridge United in addition to Arsenal and never missing a game. Hornby uses football to distract himself from the fact that he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He cares more than ever about football, since he doesn’t have much else to care about. Hornby writes that football at this time is like a “child comforter” or a “security blanket.” But at this point, Hornby is an adult. Having nothing substantial to invigorate him—only football—eventually leads to a depressive episode. As his trajectory exemplifies, escapism may be a helpful way to survive a temporary difficult time where one has little agency—like in childhood—but it can be an unhealthy coping mechanism when it becomes an all-consuming replacement for true passion and fulfillment.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
Escapism ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Escapism appears in each chapter of Fever Pitch. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire Fever Pitch LitChart as a printable PDF.
Escapism Quotes in Fever Pitch
Below you will find the important quotes in Fever Pitch related to the theme of Escapism.
Chapter 1
Quotes
After all, football’s a great game and everything, but what is it that separates those who are happy to attend half a dozen games a season—watch the big matches, stay away from the rubbish, surely the sensible way—from those who feel compelled to attend them all?
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8
Quotes
The art deco splendour of the West Stand was not possible without Dad’s deeper pockets, so Rat and I stood in the Schoolboys’ Enclosure, peering at the game through the legs of the linesmen.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9
Quotes
The simple truth is that obsessions just aren’t funny, and that obsessives don’t laugh. But there’s a complicated truth here as well: I don’t think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom.
Chapter 12
Quotes
It was the most humiliating moment of my teenage years. A complete, elaborate and perfectly imagined world came crashing down around me and fell in chunks at my feet.
Chapter 26
Quotes
For some reason, I hung on to my boyhood self for dear life, and I let him guide me through my undergraduate years; and thus football, not for the first or last time, and through no fault of its own, served both as a backbone and as a retardant.
Chapter 47
Quotes
There was another agenda altogether, involving our shared inability to get on with things away from Highbury and our shared need to carve out a little igloo for ourselves to protect us from the icy winds of the mid-eighties and our late twenties.
Chapter 66
Quotes
But it gets harder and harder, and sometimes hurting someone is unavoidable.
