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Chapter 16: Shoshanna Weber
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Restart, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity, Memory, and Responsibility
Reputation vs. Reality
Masculinity
Social Hierarchies and Bullying
Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
Back home, Joel feels like his life is out of whack. He loathed Melton—though a talented pianist, he wasn’t obsessed with his instrument the way the other students were—but now that he’s where he wants to be, his parents are nervously overattentive, while Shoshanna won’t stop mentioning Chase. When Joel snaps at her about it, she points out he’ll have to interact with Chase if he returns to video club. He responds sarcastically, but she comments, understandingly, that he must be nervous. He is: the bullying he suffered took a toll. He’s still shaking off the terrified mentality it engendered in him.
When Joel returns to school on Monday, a few kids whisper about him in the hallway, but most don’t even seem to have noticed he was gone—which rankles him. Shoshanna hovers over Joel with such annoying protective energy that he tells her to leave him alone. In one class, Brendan tells Joel all about his latest YouTube shorts and about Chase’s fabulous new personality, the latter of which annoys Joel; he wishes the whole video club hadn’t become Chase fans. In another class, Bear starts bullying Joel—but Aaron drags him away so they don’t get in more trouble.
It may be reasonable for the video-club kids to give Chase a second chance after Chase has demonstrated significant personality changes, but it also makes sense that Joel dislikes how enthusiastic his friends are now about the kid who viciously bullied him—which explains why characters from Shoshanna to Aaron care so much about loyalty, even when it's irrational. That Aaron stops Bear from bullying Joel again—for the moment—reminds readers that Aaron is smarter than Bear, though perhaps for that reason ultimately a more dangerous bully.
Themes
Joel enters video club after school while they’re screening footage of Mr. Solway. The club’s faculty advisor Ms. DeLeo pauses the video, all the kids crowd around Joel, and then Shoshanna performs a formal (re)introduction of Joel and Chase. Chase, looking horribly unhappy, says that he's hugely regretful about what he did to Joel, even though he can’t remember any of it. Joel, to his own surprise, realizes that he believes in Chase’s amnesia and in his apology—but still loathes him anyway.
Joel hates Chase even though he believes that Chase is genuinely sorry for what he did—which suggests that, on an emotional level, he cares less about Chase’s present identity than he does about Chase’s responsibility for his past victimization.
Themes
