Perspective and Reality Theme Analysis

It’s impossible to ignore the supernatural aspect of Long Way Down—all the individuals who share the elevator with Will on his way to avenge his brother Shawn’s death are ghosts. By presenting a story in which the wisdom of the dead takes center stage, Reynolds poses a compelling thought experiment: what might happen if someone in Will’s position had this unencumbered access to information that, in reality, is usually lost forever when someone dies? Through this, and through the discrepancies between what Will thought was true and what the ghosts tell him actually is true, Long Way Down suggests that there can be major differences between what’s believed and what’s true in reality—and that questioning the validity of one’s perspective or beliefs is, at once, one of the hardest and most meaningful thing a person can do.

Dani, the second ghost to join Will on the elevator, forces Will to confront the potential repercussions of following through with his plan to avenge Shawn’s death. Dani was Will’s childhood best friend and was killed as an eight-year-old when someone missed their intended target and accidentally shot her instead. After Will figures out who Dani is, her first question cuts Will to the core: what if he misses when he tries to shoot Shawn’s killer? Essentially, Dani is asking Will to consider whether following through on his community’s “Rules” of revenge is guaranteed to have its desired effect. Dani, of course, is living proof that success isn’t guaranteed—she’s dead because someone else trying to follow the Rules made a mistake. And understandably, this isn’t a conversation Will wants to have at all, let alone take seriously. Because of this, he chalks Dani’s disapproval and line of questioning up to her not understanding the Rules, rather than thinking of it as an important question he really should answer. To take a broader look at Dani’s question and the effects of an unintended death like hers, it’s worth considering what happened to Will as a result of Dani’s death. Dani’s death was what prompted Shawn to teach eight-year-old Will the Rules so that he’d stop crying. Dani’s death, then, not only killed her—it inducted Will into the cycle of violence and emotional repression that led him to his current state, in which he’s considering taking another’s life so he can stay true to the Rules.

As compelling as Dani’s question might be to the reader, Will doesn’t truly begin to question the righteousness of what he’s doing until he comes face to face with Pop, who was killed when Will was three, and therefore isn’t someone Will remembers. All Will knows about Pop is the story Shawn told him: Pop went out to avenge the murder of his brother, Uncle Mark, and was later shot at a payphone. What Will learns in the elevator is that this story is far more complicated than just that of two men—Pop and his killer—seeking revenge. Pop admits that when he went out to kill Uncle Mark’s killer, he got the wrong guy. This is, importantly, something that Pop only found out after the fact, though it’s somewhat unclear if Pop knew he made a mistake when he was still alive or only figured it out after he died. Regardless, Pop asks Will to consider what might happen if Will is also out to kill the wrong guy. The novel never confirms one way or the other whether Will is correct that Carlson Riggs, a former friend of Shawn’s, is indeed the one who killed Shawn. Frick—the man whom Shawn killed, and who was undergoing his initiation into the same gang that Riggs belongs to when he killed Buck—doesn’t recognize Riggs’s description, which suggests that it’s likely Riggs didn’t kill Shawn to avenge Frick’s death. The questions and admissions of Pop and Dani force Will to contend with the possibility that the Rules don’t work as well as they’re supposed to—they’re no guarantee that an avenger is going to exact revenge; they simply guarantee that someone is going to die.

Most important, however, are Will’s reactions to the questions and thought experiments that the ghosts pose: it’s clear that he’s never been asked to think about these questions before. In other words, everyone in Will’s life has encouraged him to view the Rules in a highly simplified and glorified way rather than to truly think about their potential consequences. Ideally, Will should’ve been asking himself the ghosts’ questions all along. It’s worth considering that while Will’s elevator ride is supernatural and enlightens him to information that he couldn’t have gotten without the ghosts, the simple act of thinking about the dead and what secrets they may have taken to their graves can still be a useful exercise. Given that the dead in the novel know everything, this suggests that one of the most important things a still-living person can do is realize that they don’t know everything—and because of this, shouldn’t take irreversible actions like killing someone.