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Chapter 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stargirl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Individuality and Conformity
Human Nature
Seeing, Visibility, and Invisibility
Friendship, Love, and Social Pressure
Summary
Analysis
The Sonoran Desert is full of ponds, but the ponds are usually dry. Underground, dormant mud frogs are sleeping. They spend much of the year like this. Then, when the rain comes, hundreds of frogs emerge. Leo likens the Mica High students to mud frogs emerging from dormancy. Instead of sullen strangers, the kids now look one another in the eye. They celebrate each other’s triumphs and feel one another’s pain.
Leo, attentive to his relatively new surroundings in Arizona, likens the mud frogs to students who’ve emerged from their own subterranean sleep. Significantly, they aren’t becoming something altogether different—they’re becoming what they’ve always been intended to be, when conditions were right.
Themes
Leo sums up this “awakening” as “a rebellion for rather than against.” Kids submit Letters to the Editor in the school paper. Over 100 audition for the musical. New clubs start. People come to school with boldly colored nails and hair. Leo doesn’t outwardly rebel, but he likes what he sees. He observes that as students celebrate their individuality, a stronger school spirit emerges.
The newly “emerged” students seem to become more of who they are, not less: speaking their minds, expressing themselves, and not feeling constrained by what’s popularly accepted. This reinforces the point that conformity tends to stifle, but where individuality is encouraged, creativity and expression flourish.
Themes
Leo tells Archie one day that the outbreak of individuality is a “miracle.” Archie replies that the trouble with miracles is that they don’t last long. Leo looks back on that December and January as a “golden age.” He couldn’t have known that “when the end came, I would be in the middle of it.”
Archie, with his older and wiser perspective, correctly predicts that Mica High’s flowering is a temporary phenomenon. As with the mud frogs, conditions have to stay just right in order to support emergent life.
Themes
