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Chapter 22: 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
Chase is back at football practice—in a non-uniformed, non-contact capacity. Due to this special treatment, the other players lightly bully him, preventing him from drinking any of the team’s Gatorade. Nevertheless, as Chase regains his football muscle memory, he realizes he enjoys playing. He thinks a person could be a football player and a video club kid, in theory, and he wonders why more people don’t try activities outside of their comfort zone. He’s also beginning to get along with the football team. He now understands, even if he doesn’t condone, the way the violence of their sport affects how they interact with each other and with other students. He’s so angry with how Aaron and Bear sabotaged his relationship with video club that he’s still not talking to them, though.
Here, Chase seems to distinguish between (on the one hand) the genuinely violent and cruel bullying he, Aaron, and Bear engaged in and (on the other hand) the mild hazing and occasional aggression the football players show to their teammates and other students: the former is far more destructive than the latter, even if the latter sometimes also goes too far. Chase shows how much he valued his friendships with Brendan, Shoshanna, and the other video club kids by refusing to speak with Aaron and Bear even though they’ve positioned themselves as his only friends.
Themes
At the end of practice on Friday, the coach makes Chase run extra laps. While he’s running, Bear tackles him into the ground—and Aaron claps. Bear accuses Chase of faking his amnesia and says they need to get even. Angry and confused, Chase demands to know why he would fake amnesia. Bear retorts that he’d do it to avoid paying his friends what he “owes.” Chase denies owing them anything and says they’re lucky he doesn’t report them to the police for stealing Mr. Solway’s Medal of Honor. Aaron, thunderstruck, says that Chase really does have amnesia—and informs him that he’s the one who stole the medal.
Chase has suspected for a while that Aaron and Bear may have stolen Mr. Solway’s Medal of Honor, but his suspicions make him feel like a bad, disloyal friend, so he doesn’t voice them—until Aaron and Bear’s manipulative, hostile behavior pushes him too far. Yet when Aaron accuses Chase of having stolen the medal, it makes perfect sense: Aaron and Bear have been worried from the novel’s beginning about getting access to a mysterious, valuable “object” in Chase’s possession that none of the boys seemed to have a legal right to. Just as the medal has previously symbolized the gap between Mr. Solway’s reputation and his sense of self, so now the medal—which pre-accident Chase stole—symbolizes the gap between Chase’s well-earned bad reputation and who he has tried to be since his accident.
Themes
Chase is about to punch Aaron when a memory hits him of taking the medal from its case. He realizes he should have known: before his accident, he was even worse than Aaron or Bear. When Aaron explains that they had a deal to split the value of the medal three ways, Chase says that he can’t remember where the medal is—and if he finds it, he’ll return it to Mr. Solway. Aaron claims he and Bear have a right to the value of the medal under the terms of their deal with the old Chase, and Bear threatens Chase. Chase yells at them and flees home, crying and hating himself.
Chase wants to take responsibility for his previous bad actions—in this case, stealing Mr. Solway’s medal—and to make reparations. Just as Aaron and Bear have tried to thwart other positive changes in Chase’s personality, here they claim they’ll prevent him from returning the stolen medal. Bear even threatens Chase, revealing the limits of his and Aaron’s supposed “loyalty.”
Themes
