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Chapter 7
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
On September 11, the narrator buys a TV/VCR at Best Buy to record the news footage of the terrorist attacks. She replays the plane hitting the Twin Towers over and over again. Trevor happened to be on his honeymoon at the time, but the narrator will later learn that Reva “was lost. Reva was gone.” The narrator replays the footage any time she “need[s] courage, or when [she is] bored.” She watches a woman wearing high heels leap off the 78th floor and thinks about how much she looks like Reva. But more than this, she thinks about how alive the woman looks: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
The new VCR player suggests that the narrator has not, in, fact changed as drastically as she would like to think. She still struggles to accept herself and her reality and to live a full life, as her choice to play and replay footage of the terrorist attacks (a mediated version of reality) instead of meditating on the reality of the horror and pain and chaos the attacks represent. The narrator’s closing lines, in which she remarks that the falling woman is “wide awake” reflect only what the narrator admires in the woman and wants for herself. And watching the woman on the screen is also a way to indirectly acknowledge Reva’s likely death in the attacks without actively processing it, allowing the narrator to sidestep thinking about how losing Reva has impacted her emotionally.
Themes
