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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Care, Self-Destruction, and Self-Indulgence
Isolation
Meaninglessness
Repression
Summary
Analysis
A few days later, the narrator wakes up on her couch. Reva has since left. Her vision is blurred. She’s still wearing Reva’s mother’s shoes and the fur coat. All she has on underneath it is a nude bodysuit. She has a stamp on her hand from a club, Dawn’s Early. There’s a half-empty bottle of Gordon’s gin on the table, as well as some polaroids of the narrator out at a club with some “party people,” including—shockingly—Ping Xi.
Despite her insistence that she hates the art scene people, the narrator’s unconscious guides her to them in her drug-induced blackout. This suggests that she in fact craves and perhaps even needs socialization, despite her claims to the contrary Ping Xi’s sudden reappearance in this chapter perhaps foreshadows that he will play a critical role later in the book.
Themes
The narrator hasn’t thought about Ping Xi in ages—she avoids thinking about Ducat in general. She wishes she could forget the people she met in the art world, all the glamorous party people. The interns at Ducat would talk about their wild nights out at clubs around town, places that the kids of artists and other influential people would frequent. She guesses this is the kind of place that Dawn’s Early is. The narrator walks to the window and sees that it’s snowing, and she’s grateful: now she can stay in and return to her normal sleeping schedule.
The narrator might not have consciously thought about Ping Xi or Ducat, but the fact that she is somehow drawn to him in her intoxicated state suggests that her old life still has a hold on her and that she hungers for human interaction. Her increasingly extreme unconscious activities (calling Dr. Tuttle, boarding the LIRR to Reva’s mother’s funeral, clubbing with Ping Xi) reinforce the reality that the narrator’s hibernation has not destroyed her natural urge to be part of the human world—she continues to struggle with the dissonance between the relationships and life she has and those she wants to have.
Themes
Before going back to sleep, the narrator takes a shower, and a memory suddenly occurs to her of a police officer who visited her middle school to teach the students about drugs and drug abuse. He warned them about Rohypnol but added that, on the positive side, “the victim forgets!” Now, she surveys her own memory and is satisfied when she can locate the answers to a series of random trivia facts.
In this passage, the narrator implicitly compares the memory loss she has experienced on Infermiterol with the memory loss triggered by Rohypnol (perhaps better known by its nickname “roofies,” Rohypnol is commonly known as a “date rape drug” for its sedative properties). In so doing, she indirectly compares her use of Infermiterol on herself with the nefarious actions of someone drugging their date. Scenes like this one hint that the narrator knows on some level that what she is doing to herself (with her constant sleeping and drug use) is unhealthy, yet she continues to engage in the self-destructive behaviors anyway.
Themes
The narrator steps out of the shower and takes an Ambien and some Benadryl, then she checks her phone and sees that she’s called Trevor’s phone and an unfamiliar number, which she guesses must be Ping Xi’s.
That the narrator has placed phone calls only to people she dislikes (Ping Xi) or who actively mistreat her (Trevor) is further proof of her self-destructive tendencies. But it also shows how desperate she is (at least unconsciously) for human interaction
Themes
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The narrator lounges around until evening and then takes a Nembutal and watches movies. She finds the porn channel again and turns the volume down low so that the noises can lull her to sleep. But she can’t fall asleep—in fact, she doesn’t feel at all sleepy. She calls Trevor, who snaps that it’s 5:00 a.m. The narrator begs him to come over. She hears a woman’s voice in the background on Trevor’s end. He grunts “Wrong number,” into the phone and then hangs up. She calls him again and again and tells him she misses him the next time he picks up. He hangs up on her.
The narrator’s behavior continues to contradict her claims that she does not need human interaction, yet she remains in denial about this dissonance, recasting the porn movie sounds as noises rather than human voices. Meanwhile, her compulsion to contact Trevor, whom she admits has treated her sadistically and cruelly, reinforces her tendency toward self-destructive behavior.
Themes
Still unable to sleep, the narrator takes more and more pills. She pops in Braveheart, but then the VCR breaks, so she’s stuck with TV. She watches nonsensical commercials on TV: commercials for cat food, for chocolate yogurt, for anti-aging creams. She flips through the channels until Reva starts banging on the door, begging to be let in, insisting she needs to talk.
The nonsensical commercials on TV validate the narrator’s stance that life is meaningless and trivial. The arrival of Reva, apparently in crisis, could offer the narrator an opportunity to do something meaningful—to reach out to support a friend in need—but, given the narrator’s disregard for Reva up to this point, it’s doubtful she will take the initiative or even recognize it as an opportunity to find the connection and meaning she so craves.
Themes
Reluctantly, the narrator lets Reva inside. Reva announces that her relationship with Ken is over. Then she starts to cry. She tries to hug the narrator, but the narrator pushes her off. Eventually, Reva explains that Ken transferred her, claiming not to want to see her around the office anymore, though technically the transfer is a promotion. Reva can’t believe he would do this to her when they used to be in love. The narrator doubts this. Inwardly, she reflects that Reva’s complaining is a good thing, since it encourages the narrator to be cold and Zen, like a Buddhist monk. Eventually, Reva alludes to being pregnant by Ken, though the narrator ignores this big reveal. Instead, she insinuates that Reva is being overdramatic about the whole thing.
Predictably, the narrator rejects Reva when Reva comes to her for comfort and support. Even if Reva’s relationship with Ken was bound to end in disaster, the hurt that Reva feels in response to his reaction is real, and her apparent pregnancy poses a problem that goes beyond the emotional. Yet the narrator can find no compassion for her friend. Instead, she turns inward and focuses on how Reva’s crisis can benefit her hibernation project, presenting her with an opportunity to be cold and detached from others. This scene thus further highlights how the narrator’s hibernation is an exercise in self-indulgence rather than self-improvement.
Themes
Reva glances around the apartment and comments on all the prescriptions. She accepts a Xanax from the narrator, then she asks for a cigarette. The narrator is amused—even when drunk, Reva is usually so uptight. The narrator grumbles that Ken is an idiot. She suggests that maybe Reva will run into Trevor, who also works at the World Trade Center, where Ken has transferred her. Reva asks if the narrator wishes Trevor still loved her. The narrator does wish this, but she doesn’t admit it to Reva. Reva kisses the narrator’s cheek, tells her she loves her, then leaves.
The narrator’s observation that Ken is an idiot represents an effort—albeit a feeble one—to try to comfort Reva. This scene reminds readers that the narrator is capable of treating others with compassion and yet, more often than not, simply chooses not to. She will continue to stagnate and to fail in her goal to restore her health and rejuvenate her life if she stubbornly refuses to engage meaningfully with others.
Themes
After Reva leaves, the narrator thinks about Reva’s apparent pregnancy—an accident. She feels sorry for the thing in Reva’s womb, the mere “side effect of delusion and sloppiness.” She wonders if maybe Reva should keep it—perhaps that “would wake her up.”
The narrator describes Reva’s pregnancy as a “side effect of delusion and sloppiness” because she sees Reva’s affair with Ken as a deluded attempt to find meaning and happiness in love and human connection. The unfortunate “side effect” of the pregnancy validates the narrator’s belief that life is fundamentally meaningless and miserable and that distracting oneself from that reality with love, work, or money only leads to more misery.
Themes
The narrator calls Trevor again. He snaps that Claudia, his partner, doesn’t believe in platonic friendships between men and women. He really likes her, so he and the narrator can’t be friends. The narrator pretends to only be calling to ask for money. He hangs up on her. She keeps calling and calling. The next time he answers, she threatens to kill herself if he doesn’t come over to bring her a DVD player and have sex with her. She hangs up, knowing he will come. She calls down to the doorman and instructs him to send Trevor up when he arrives.
Trevor treats the narrator cruelly even without provocation, so it’s unlikely that anything good will come of his forthcoming visit to her apartment. The self-destructive, manipulative behavior the narrator exhibits in this scene highlights how unstable and erratic she has become since initiating her hibernation project. Though she has billed it as an undertaking of self-care, in practice, it has led to increasingly extreme self-destructive behavior.
Themes
Trevor arrives at some point, though the narrator doesn’t remember when. She feels his penis in her mouth. After he finishes, he leaves and says he won’t be back. After, the narrator gets up, puts on some clothes, and takes some Advil. She flips through TV channels and impulsively buys a rice cooker.
The nonchalance with which the narrator recovers from this brutal sex act with Trevor (which could justifiably be considered sexual assault, given the narrator’s apparently unconscious state at its onset) and transitions to buying a rice cooker shows how detached she has become from her life: she has become entirely indifferent to anything that happens to her, good or bad. From this perspective, cruel and unfeeling sex has no more significance than buying a kitchen appliance she doesn’t need.
Themes
