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Chapter 21
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in It’s Kind of a Funny Story, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mental Health
Art and Self-Discovery
Peer Pressure vs. Self-Empowerment
Friendship and Romance
Summary
Analysis
Craig is surprised that the hospital has given him curry chicken, which is luckily one of the few things he can eat even before a Shift occurs. At lunch, Craig talks with Humble, who complains that the hospital contains a lot of “yuppies” who don’t care about fellow humans. Humble talks about his own life and says that back when he was 15, he smoked a lot of pot and had a 28-year-old girlfriend.
Like Muqtada, Humble is someone that Craig might not necessarily meet in his daily life outside the psychiatric hospital, but their shared condition puts them on equal footing, nevertheless. Humble’s willingness to open up about his life and his worldviews to Craig shows that people like Craig and want to get closer to him, even if Craig himself struggles to realize it.
Themes
Humble is surprised that Craig volunteered to enter the ward. Humble himself got committed by his doctor. His doctor asked Humble if he was trying to kill himself by not taking his blood pressure medication, and Humble said yes.
This passage shows how not everyone has the same experience as Craig. The novel raises the question of when a doctor must go against a patient’s wishes in order to protect the welfare of that patient.
Themes
